Tobias Wolff's 'Old School'  By hannah duncan

Alfred A. Knopf, November 2003

This is the basis for Tobias Wolff's second novel, Old School, where the truth is hidden and multi-layered.

Old School details the senior year of a nameless protagonist at a nameless prep school in the 1960s, where the Honor Code is gospel and snobbishness is decried to almost utopian standards. Still, one thing the school does take pride in is its niche as a literary place. The English Department is held in high regard, and three times a year the school hosts illustrious writers. With each visitor comes the chance for one boy to win a private audience with the literary icon through writing competitions, with the visitor choosing the final winning piece.

The bulk of the novel revolves around these three visitors and how the protagonist changes throughout his final year, with each visitor bringing something new in the way the protagonist views himself, his peers, the world around him. First Robert Frost, then Ayn Rand turn up at the school -- the latter bringing out the pretentious teenager that lurks in everyone at that impressionable stage of life. Indeed, when the narrator uses the words "Men were born to soar, and you have chosen to kneel!" to voice his disgust at what he sees as the fawning antics of a clerk in a shoe store, one can't help but smirk. Rand's actual visit to the school, though, makes the narrator think that she knows little of life, and he turns from her idealistic world where everyone is beautiful and aloof, and back to the Hemingway stories of the "little people" that Rand despises.

When the final visitor of the year is announced as Ernest Hemingway, the atmosphere at the school is ignited; if the boys aren't pretending to be Nick Adams, they're frantically writing away to secure the much-coveted audience with their hero. The narrator, too, becomes completely caught up in the Hemingway competition, so desperate to win and meet his literary idol that he takes to copy-typing Hemingway stories, "in order to learn what it actually felt like to write something great." He continues to do so as the competition deadline draws ever nearer, hoping that he will be able to emulate the author's greatness by learning his style -- when really he should be trying to find his own.

Throughout the text Wolff constantly alludes to this imperative: "know thyself". The protagonist has spent the past four years hiding his true self from his (moneyed, Gentile) peers, ashamed of his scholarship status, Jewish ancestry and his single-parent, middle-class existence back west.

He realises that nearly all of what he has previously written has also been used to the same end -- to seem autobiographical and give a false picture of his life. When he writes his entry for the Frost competition after watching firemen at his school, he taps into something too emotional: "...too close to home...I could hear and see everything in that apartment...I could see myself there, and didn't want to. Even more, I didn't want anyone else to." He ends up giving in a piece that he knows is not as good, but reveals nothing of himself.

By the time of the Hemingway competition, though, the narrator has grown enough, has realised that his falseness up to now has left him an empty caricature, an actor playing a "stale, conventional role" that leaves him "a stranger even to those I called my friends." So he sits down the night before the competition deadline and tries to find out who it is he's been hiding the whole time.

He eventually gets down a "true piece of writing", but even though he identifies with the story he hands in, it is not really his true story, and as such does indeed become a dangerous thing. As one of the teachers points out, self-consciousness is often associated with the Fall, and fall the narrator does -- out of favour with the school, and indeed to some extent, with the reader. The protagonist's final attempt at honest writing seems doomed from the start. The reader knows that, but at the same time can almost understand why he does what he does. Having followed this character from the beginning of the school year, the reader has watched him come to conclusions about the people in his life, where he fits in, his problems with his Jewish heritage.

However, it seems almost as if Wolff then forgets about this. He makes some mention of the fact that even outside of school the protagonist has a hard time living life as he wants as opposed to how he feels he should: "Even as I lived my life I was seeing it on the back of a book." Old School changes tack once the boy leaves school. Most of the book is set in the school, supposedly an idyllic place, with its attempted lack of hierarchy among the pupils and teachers who all seem jolly decent fellows. There is little in the way of description, but the reader comes to understand the place and the people through the stories Wolff tells. Later, the narrator's arrival in the real world, life outside the coddled school atmosphere, and the sudden skipping of time -- about twenty years in just a few pages -- seem almost like an epilogue, but it takes up about a third of the book. It is as if Wolff had been aiming at one thing with his book, then decided to go a different way. It is not wholly jarring but there still seems something... not quite right. It's not where the reader imagines the book ending up as they start reading it, and while this can be a good thing, here it merely serves to let down what has come before.

So the narrator leaves school, goes to New York, holds a series of means-to-end jobs and joins the army, then goes back to college, settles down, has a family, all of which is skipped over, as I said, in a couple pages. But I want more. Not for the character to rapidly grow up, face his mistake, have a family, be invited back by the school and be reunited with a teacher. It mainly feels like some of the pages were accidentally glued together and you didn't notice while reading, but wondered what had happened to all that time in between. While the narrator may end up knowing himself, the reader is left cold.

However, the ending doesn't completely ruin the book. A literature professor at Stanford, Wolff knows his stuff -- this is definitely a book for the literary geeks out there who want a break from the hardcore shit but can't cope with the fiction-lite that's around. Old School is not very heavy reading, but one can appreciate all its literary nods and references. In a stylistic sense, it is possible to draw some comparisons with Hemingway, through the conciseness of writing. Hemingway had his "iceberg theory", that is, that only 20% of the iceberg is ever seen, the remaining 80% is under water -- i.e. in Hemingway, things were implied, left to the reader to determine. In the same way, while Wolff maybe gives us more than 20%, a lot is left unsaid, up to the reader to understand that it is there. Maybe, of course, this is reading too much into the narrator's obsession with Hemingway, but it was still a nice touch, the author mimicking the style himself.

There exists a kind of Oscar mentality, that unless films are epic, challenging or deal with prostitutes/terminally ill people/death row victims et cetera, then they don't quite deserve something as prestigious as an Oscar. In this case, substitute Oscar for the PEN/Faulkner award. I'm not certain this is necessarily award standard. It was a good book, enjoyable to read and Wolff has an undemanding style of writing. But it wasn't epic or challenging - if anything, it was a bit of a let-down due to the incongruous ending. And prostitutes, the terminally ill and death row inmates have a way of avoiding 1960s East Coast prep schools.

NOTE: Tobias Wolff's Old School was nominated for the 2004 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. John Updike will accept the award for his Early Stories at the presentation ceremony on May 8.

This article was originally published in Knot Magazine - it can be found here.