Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #909496 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 195 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Tobias Wolff's Old School is at once a celebration of literature and a 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 centre 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 realises, 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.

Near the end of the novel, the narrator 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, Amazon.com

Christopher Taylor, Sunday Telegraph, 25th January 2004
"'Old School' is comparable to the work of Philip Roth. This reviewer was tempted to send Wolff a fan letter."

Blake Morrison, Guardian
'A concise, beautifully written novel'

Customer Reviews

"I'd seen my own life laid bare on the page."
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

Read and Learn
Like Wolff's other books, Old School can be read in a day or so thanks to its triple virtues of brevity, readability and moreishness.

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?

Enjoyable
I was drawn to this book after reading some excellent reviews and the fact that it has been described as "Dead Poets' Society meets Catcher in the Rye" i knew this was one i had to read.

Old School is set at a prestigious American school for boys during the 1960's and describes the rivalry which emerges among the classmates as they compete against one another to win literary regocnition for their writing and the chance to meet a celebrated writer. Only one writer visits the school each term and only one boy can win the competition to privately meet with the author. The sense of competition really escalates, however, when it is announced that the last writer to visit, during the final term before graduation will be Ernest Hemmingway.

I found the initial chapters of this book, while beautifully written, a little slow and the plot a little weak, however, once i reached the half way point things became a lot more interesting. The descriptions of the boys relationships with one another and the descriptions of their dorms as well as the touching relationships which emerge between them and certain teachers were reminiscent of 'Catcher in the Rye'.

For me the final chapters in which the narrator describes his early adult life, after leaving school are the most effective as the novel really comes into its own and has some lengthy but insightful character descriptions which can be quite moving.

I think this novel is really successful in capturing a certain time and place in recent history and is a great read for anyone who loves adolescent fiction, in a distinguished academic setting, with some interesting literary references... well worth a look!