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Old School, by Tobias Wolff
Aug. 14th, 2004 10:29 amRead this several months ago. About time I reviewed it.
Each year in the early 1960's, an exclusive American boy's school holds a writing competition. The prize is a private audience with a famous writer. Competition for this prize is as fierce and prestigious as any sporting event. The students are obsessed by their literary idols - "book-drunk boys" is the beautiful phrase Wolff uses. When it is announced that Hemmingway will be this year's guest, our narrator decides to overcome his writer's block by plagurising someone else's story.
Old School is heady with wealth, privelige and learning. Think Dead Poet's Society, or The Secret History. Like them, it feels like a fantasy, a wonderland dreamt up by an overly-bright young boy after being bullied by dumb jocks. I've always been seduced by this sort of thing. Maybe it should be it's own genre, a sort of New England Gothic. Wolff's writing is simple and masculine yet highly evocative. And he cares passionately about the importance of stories to our lives.
And perhaps that is his theme - that our fictions and lies express who we are far more truthfully than mere facts ever could. Which could sound pretentious, coming from a writer. By Wolff is too sly to fall into preaching simple morals. Old School has all the complications and contradictions of real wisdom.
It's a slim book - less that 200 pages. And Wolff never paints his characters with quite the detail of, say, Donna Tartt. But it's a beautiful little book nonetheless, and it will linger with you, like a dream.
Each year in the early 1960's, an exclusive American boy's school holds a writing competition. The prize is a private audience with a famous writer. Competition for this prize is as fierce and prestigious as any sporting event. The students are obsessed by their literary idols - "book-drunk boys" is the beautiful phrase Wolff uses. When it is announced that Hemmingway will be this year's guest, our narrator decides to overcome his writer's block by plagurising someone else's story.
Old School is heady with wealth, privelige and learning. Think Dead Poet's Society, or The Secret History. Like them, it feels like a fantasy, a wonderland dreamt up by an overly-bright young boy after being bullied by dumb jocks. I've always been seduced by this sort of thing. Maybe it should be it's own genre, a sort of New England Gothic. Wolff's writing is simple and masculine yet highly evocative. And he cares passionately about the importance of stories to our lives.
And perhaps that is his theme - that our fictions and lies express who we are far more truthfully than mere facts ever could. Which could sound pretentious, coming from a writer. By Wolff is too sly to fall into preaching simple morals. Old School has all the complications and contradictions of real wisdom.
It's a slim book - less that 200 pages. And Wolff never paints his characters with quite the detail of, say, Donna Tartt. But it's a beautiful little book nonetheless, and it will linger with you, like a dream.
