Old School (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: visiting writer, typing class, Big Jeff, Dean Makepeace, Ayn Rand (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Tobias Wolff's Old School is at once a celebration of literature and delicate hymn to a lost innocence of American life and art. Set in a New England prep school in the early 1960s, the novel imagines a final, pastoral moment before the explosion of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the suicide of Ernest Hemingway.

The unnamed narrator is one of several boys whose life revolves around the school's English teachers, those polymaths who seemed to know "exactly what was most worth knowing." For the boys, literature is the center of life, and their obsession culminates in a series of literary competitions during their final year. The prize in each is a private audience with a visiting writer who serves as judge for the entries.

At first, the narrator is entirely taken with the battle. As he fails in his effort to catch Robert Frost's attention and then is unable--due to illness--to even compete for his moment with Ayn Rand, he devotes his energies to a masterpiece for his hero, Hemingway. But, confronting the blank page, the narrator discovers his cowardice, his duplicity. He has withheld himself, he realizes, even from his roommate. He has used his fiction to create a patrician gentility, a mask for his middle class home and his Jewish ancestry. Through the competition for Hemingway, fittingly, all of his illusions about literature dissolve.

Old School is a small, neatly made book, spare and clear in its prose. Each chapter is self-contained and free of anything extraneous to the essentials of plot, mood, and character. Near the end of the novel, the narrator, now a respected writer, imagines that he might one day write about his school days. But he is daunted. "Memory," he says, "is a dream to begin with, and what I had was a dream of memory, not to be put to the test." Old School enters this interplay between dreams and the adult interrogation of memory. Risking sentimentality, Wolff confronts a golden age that never was. From the confrontation, he distills a powerful novel of failed expectations and, ultimately, redemptive self-awareness. --Patrick O'Kelley --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

A scholarship boy at a New England prep school grapples with literary ambition and insecurity in this lucid, deceptively sedate novel, set in the early 1960s and narrated by the unnamed protagonist from the vantage point of adulthood. Each year, the school hosts a number of visiting writers, and the boys in the top form are allowed to compete for a private audience by composing a poem or story. The narrator judges the skills of his competitors, avidly exposing his classmates' weaknesses and calculating their potential ("I knew better than to write George off.... He could win.... Bill was a contender"). His own chances are hurt by his inability to be honest with himself and examine his ambivalent feelings about his Jewish roots. After failing to win audiences with Robert Frost and Ayn Rand, he is determined to be chosen by the last and best guest, legendary Ernest Hemingway. The anxiety of influence afflicts all the boys, but in crafting his final literary offering, the narrator discovers inspiration in imitation, finding his voice in someone else's. The novel's candid, retrospective narration ruefully depicts its protagonist's retreat further and further behind his public facade ("I'd been absorbed so far into my performance that nothing else came naturally"). Beneath its staid trappings, this is a sharply ironic novel, in which love of literature is counterbalanced by bitter disappointment (as one character bluntly puts it, "[Writing] just cuts you off and makes you selfish and doesn't really do any good"). Wolff, an acclaimed short story writer (The Night in Question, etc.) and author of the memoir This Boy's Life, here offers a delicate, pointed meditation on the treacherous charms of art.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 195 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (August 31, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375701494
• ISBN-13: 978-0375701498
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (126 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #23,444 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

98 of 109 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Book-drunk boys" and serious writers., December 16, 2003

By	G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Old School (Hardcover)

As a literature student at Arizona State University nearly twenty-five years ago, I was like one the "book-drunk boys" of Wolff's first novel, OLD SCHOOL, and "Toby" Wolff was my writing instructor. As a teacher, Wolff not only encouraged us to read important writers--Checkhov, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, Fitzgerald--to improve our writing, but he also inspired us with his notion that "one could not live in a world without stories" (p. 131). Fiction, he said, takes us out of ourselves and into other lives. In OLD SCHOOL, Wolff demonstrates his talent for practicing what he teaches.

OLD SCHOOL is written in the form of a fictionalized memoir. Set in the 1960s, Wolff's novel is about a single academic year at an all-male East Coast prep school, in which the narrator and his book-obsessed classmates compete for a private audience with visiting writers, Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway by writing poetry and stories. Not surprisingly, Wolff's narrator tries to improve his odds by immersing himself in Ayn Rand's FOUNTAINHEAD (which he reads four times) and Hemingway's short stories. In their shameless attempts to win the writing competition, the boys adopt their literary heroes' writing styles. The results reveal that phoney writing can be quite funny.

OLD SCHOOL is not only about immersing oneself in important literature, but it is also about the honesty and self-awareness required to write important literature. In his novel, Wolff employs Frost, Rand, and Hemingway as characters to illustrate his point: although each of these writers is something of a phony in person, each is nevertheless capable of creating something authentic in their writing. OLD SCHOOL may be read as a study of this paradox, and what it means to be a serious writer like Tobias Wolff.

G. Merritt

45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I'd seen my own life laid bare on the page.", November 4, 2003

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: Old School (Hardcover)

In this homage to literature, the literary life, and the power of literature to influence a reader's life, Tobias Wolff focuses his attention on a small New England prep school in 1960, a school in which students live and breathe "the writing life." The headmaster has studied with Robert Frost, and the Dean is thought to have been a friend of Ernest Hemingway during World War I. To the boys, the English Department is "a kind of chivalric order," where they practice the "ritual swordplay of their speech."

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

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars slimly wonderful, July 25, 2004

By	B. Capossere (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Old School (Hardcover)

Old School is a small, quietly wonderful book that will not have you on the edge of your seat, laughing out loud, or questioning various societal roles and rules. What it will do is captivate you in its spare fashion, surround you with a shared sense of love for literature, recall to you your poignant coming-of-age moments, fear, conflicts.
Set at an all boy elite prep school and centering on a young character who has manage to hide that he is middle-class and Jewish, the book centers on the annual writing contest where the winner gets to meet the invited writer of merit personally. during these years, the visiting writers are Ayn Rand, Hemingway (who doesn't actually appear), and Robert Frost. The competition is fierce and sparks some questionable acts, all of which are recalled in later years by the narrator. While he and his friends, along with the adult characters (the dean, some teachers, a teacher's wife), are sparsely drawn, the few details are so rich that the book suffers not at all. Rand and Frost make strong guest appearances as characters, captured brilliantly and humorously. Even better perhaps than the characters is their writing--Wolff does a wonderful job of capturing/parodying the adolescent writer and the way in which they tend to mimic established ones--all with a sense of sincerity rather than mockery.
The book is more than a love affair with literature, it delves in its few pages into concepts of honesty, of redemption, of friendship and identity, of shame and healing. But to be honest, even when these themes cropped up, moving as they were, well-handled as they were, they paled in comparison to Wolff's description of boys drinking literature like water and agonizing over writing like an early love affair.
It's a quick read, but one that should be lingered over. Don't toss it down in an afternoon though you could. Spend some time with it, reread some of the better sections, take some trips down memory lane yourself. Strongly recommended.