Old School [Paperback]

I am convinced that it's as much memoir as fiction, since the nameless narrator fits Wolff in age (at high school in 1960) and goes on to fight in Vietnam. The book therefore fits in chronogically, very neatly between the end of This Boy's Life and the beginning of In Pharaoh's Army. Several of the early set pieces, too, have the ring of truth in that they're neither outlandish nor neat enough to be exclusive hand-tooled fiction. But that's not to say it isn't well written, which it is - perfectly - and of which the first paragraph should be evidence enough:

"Robert Frost made his visit in November of 1960, just a week after the general election. It tells you something about our school that the prospect of his arrival cooked up more interest than the contest between Nixon and Kennedy, which for most of us was no contest at all. Nixon was a straight arrow and a scold. If he'd been one of us we would have glued his shoes to the floor. Kennedy, though - here was a warrior, an ironist, terse and unhysterical. He had his clothes under control. His wife was a fox. And he read and wrote books, one of which, Why England Slept, was required reading in my honors history seminar. We recognised Kennedy; we could still see in him the boy who would have been a favorite here, roguish and literate, and with that almost formal insouciance that both enacted and discounted the fact of his class."

The opening line refers to the meat of the book - visiting writers come to the school, and one boy will get to have a private audience with him or her. This boy is the one who writes the best story, to be judged by the esteemed visitor. Here is where the book becomes more obviously fictional and inventive, with a straightish plot involving plagiarism and dishonour. It is also where Wolff is at his best, in the scenes where Frost and later Ayn Rand visit the school, and in the build-up to the visit by the great white shark of boy's own American literature, Ernest Hemingway, the narrator's literary idol. Wolff has great fun at the expense of Randy Ann's (to almost anagrammatize her) swivel-eyed right-of-Hitler madness, and puts in Frost's mouth an eloquent rebuttal to a questioner who demands agreement that formal rhyme and rhythm in verse is inadequate in the face of 'modern consciousness', beaten and blustered as it is by war and angst:

"Don't tell me about war. I lost my nearest friend in the one they call the Great War. So did Achilles lose his friend in the war, and Homer did no injustice to his grief by writing about it in dactylic hexameters. There've always been wars, and they've always been as foul as we could make them. It is very fine and pleasant to think ourselves the most put-upon folk in history - but then everyone has thought that from the beginning. It makes a grand excuse for all manner of laziness. But about my friend. I wrote a poem for him. I still write poems for him. Would you honor [that word again: a theme in Old School] your friend by putting words down anyhow, just as they come to you - with no thought for the sound they make, the meaning of their sound, the sound of their meaning? Would that give a true account of the loss?

"I am thinking of Achilles' grief. That famous, terrible grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Maybe it only really exists in form. Form is everything. Without it you've got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry - sincere, maybe, for what that's worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry."

And there you have it. A short book which is a breeze to read and which is filled with things that you will keep coming back to (I'm damn near tempted to start it again right now). What are you waiting for?

On the back cover its says: "Think Dead Poets' Society crossed with The Catcher in the Rye". Well, not exactly. The adolescent narrator isn't Holden Caulfield, he's not cracking up; and the school isn't the philistine institution of DPS, quite the contrary. Set in 1960-61, this school has a literary tradition that it's extremely proud of, and its boys are actively encouraged both to read widely and to write themselves. To this end, prestigious writers are invited to the school three times a year and on each occasion a competition is held. The boys are invited to submit a piece of their own writing and the winner receives a private audience with the visitor. This honour is coveted more than just about anything else in the life of the school. The story's narrator is one of a number of hopeful young writers at the school, and in his final term the visiting author is to be his hero, Ernest Hemingway.

This novel delivers all the sweet seriousness and passion of youth. It gives you full-blooded aspiration not yet blunted by bitter experience, though you know this is just around the corner. With the arrival of each writer, expectations are confronted head-on by the living, breathing person suddenly in their midst: in the case of Robert Frost, expectations are awesomely exceeded; in the case of Ayn Rand, they are dashed in the most splendidly awful and brilliantly funny chapter in the book (for my money). This is a novel about the power of reading, and about writing itself. As the story unfolds, the young narrator slowly comes to realise that if he is to be the real thing as a writer he must find the courage to accept, and speak of, his own life openly and with brutal honesty.

I've not read Tobias Wolff before. This man's the business: precise, elegant, and a pleasure to read through and through. A review in the inside cover says: "Some readers may wish to turn from the last page to the first and begin again." I agree. Pure gold!

For these students, the highlights of the school year are the three-times-a-year appearances of literary luminaries. When a writer visits, one boy has the opportunity to have a private audience with him, an honor for which the boys contend in vigorously competitive writing contests. The speaker/narrator, a scholarship student, is desperate to win an audience: "My aspirations were mystical," he says. "I wanted to receive the laying on of hands that had written living stories and poems." As various writers--Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and finally, everyone's idol, Ernest Hemingway--are scheduled to appear at the school, the reader observes the growth of the boys, especially the speaker, as they are influenced by and react to the contest, to each other, to the visiting writers, and to the writers' speeches. In the contest to meet Hemingway, the novel reaches its peak, and in a shocking way, the speaker's life changes forever.

Wolff's novel is most remarkable for its point of view and for its conciseness. We never know what the speaker looks like or even his name, since it is through his eyes that the entire novel is filtered. He is interested in poems and short stories and philosophy and writing, all of which he talks about in detail, not in the observation of his surroundings. The limited setting of a New England prep school expands as the speaker ages and moves from school to the crueler outside world, and in later chapters, in which we see him as a mature writer, we also see how he uses some of his school experiences in his fiction, some of which appears within this novel.

Old School is a novel which students of writing will treasure--for its revelations of what it means to be a writer, its insights into the thinking of a perceptive teenager who is both idealistic and pragmatic, its irony, and its remarkable narrative voice. The themes are beautifully realized, and not one word is wasted or rings false. Though Wolff says that "No true account can be given of how or why you become a writer," he comes as close here to illustrating that process as in any other novel I've ever read about the writing life. Mary Whipple