Name: Michael Springer's review of Old School by Tobias Wolff
Item: Old School
Rating: 4
Author: Michael Springer

Tobias Wolff

It's 1960, in America, at a prestigious boys' public school, a place of privilege that places great emphasis on its democratic ideals. A teenage boy in his final year, on a scholarship, has learned to fit in with his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself and his background. Class is ever present, but the only acknowledged snobbery is a literary snobbery. These boys' heroes are writers - Fitzgerald, Cummings, Kerouac. They want to be writers themselves, and the school has a tradition whereby once a term big names from the literary world are invited to visit. A contest takes place with the boys admitting a piece of writing and the winner having a private audience with the visitor. When it is announced that Hemingway will be the next to come to the school, competition among the boys is intense, and the morals the school and the boys hold dear - honour, loyalty and friendship - are tested. No one writes more astutely than Wolff about the process by which character is formed, and here he illuminates the irresistible strength, even the violence, of the self-creative urge. This is a novel that, in its power and its beauty, in its precision and its humanity, is at once contemporary and timeless.

Old School

giulia

Michael Springer

So, I want to live in this book. This is a bittersweet book about myth...the myth of being innocent, and the myth of what it's like going to a private school. . . a private, cloistered high school. As a big-time literature nerd aficionado, the school in this novel is every bit as magical as Hogwarts: visits from writers like Hemingway, Ayn Rand, Robert Frost, writing contests to actually get to hang out with them...knowing they'd actually read something you'd WRITTEN. 

You know, THIS kind of school:




Most of us can only conceive of these schools from the images we've gotten from movies or novels. In fact, the snootiest high school in Indianapolis seems downright gritty compared to this school. My own high school experience had NOTHING in common with what Tobias went through...it's the same as the myth we have of the "college experience:" full of partying, heavy drinking, adventures, and--the part where reality falls down--somehow staying in school and finishing a degree. You can act like Van Wilder as much as you want. For half a semester, before you're back at your parent's house.

Wolff recognizes how easily these myths can be shattered, but he immerses us in this world that's totally divorced from anything most of us have experienced. Well, the ENVIRONMENT is totally different, but we may recognize some of the people: goofy boys (it's a boys' school) acting stupid, energetic, self-absorbed and horny. In other words, acting like high schoolers. Wolff captures the navel-gazing attitude of the writer....which probably wasn't a huge stretch...but makes this young author as flighty and and sexually frustrated as we all were at that age--well, I was, anyway. 

In other words, the characters worked, and the setting made me envious for a myth. 

My high-school experience [Note: this is where I completely stop talking about the book and start navel gazing] was punctuated with homecoming football games, one of which was called off in mid-game because of a big brawl in the audience. I WAS the author at my school...we didn't have visiting authors. In sophomore year, I shyly asked my English teacher if she'd read some of the poetry I wrote and would tell me whether it was any good or not. I don't have it anymore, but I can recreate the mood and tone for you:

As darkness fills my withered heart,
I miss you every time we're apart.

I miss your lips, the way you smell,
it seems my whole world turns to hell.

When I'm alone, I miss you.

You get the idea. I wrote teenage angsty poetry filled with allusions to greek myths and vampires. I often stole lines verbatim from Nine Inch Nails. 

I basically thought I was Brandon Lee from The Crow: jaded and heartbroken, slash super-cool.



Nevermind the fact that my heart wasn't broken by my true love dying, but by my first girlfriend breaking up with me just because we didn't have anything in common other than horniness. Anyway.

I made the teacher slog through page after page of this crapola, and when she finished reading it, she said, "This is TERRIFIC! You're so talented!" And then, she helped me get a few of them published in collections of high schooler poetry...you know, the kind where they publish three poems per page, and sell you the collection for some ridiculous price. The opus I spent many evenings crafting, called "Cassiopeia," was on the same page as some chode's exercise in stupidity called "Pizza." The poem focused on how much the author liked eating it. Reading the poem, I was filled with the sense that I'd been deceived and...well, a sudden craving for pizza. 

So, maybe this idea of innocence isn't a myth...we DO grow up with a sense that our uniqueness is going to be recognized and embraced by the world. We're going to be famous poets! Rock stars! Actors and ballerinas! But, we eventually have to initiate plan B, and it's when we do this that we start recognizing the myth. We aren't all here to save the world from Voldemort. 

So, as I read this, I wanted to live in this book. I wanted that sense that success was inevitable, that the world was just waiting to recognize my brilliance and toss money and fame at me. Because that's a sense that went away quite a few years ago. 

Because life isn't a narrative like that. It's disorganized, and there are billions of main characters. Life is brilliant, even when you go to a BFE public school, even if you can't go to school, whether you have money or not. The myths leave out the car accidents, the necessary part-time jobs, the fact that love is always a murkier and rockier thing than art pretends it is. The myths we create for ourselves usually leave out all of the chaos.

There's nothing wrong with chaos. It's the most natural thing there is.

Melody Izard

Read for a book group – we had an interesting discussion. A New England prep school student submits a story to a contest whose winner will get to meet Hemingway. The story is one that he copied from a literary magazine from a girls prep school. He is discovered and expelled and Hemingway kills himself. I don’t think they meant to imply there was any connection.

During his senior year at an elite New England prep school, a young man who had struggled to find it with his contemporaries finds his life unraveling thanks to the school's obsession with literary figures and their work during a visit from an author for whose blessing a young writer would do almost anything. By the author of This Boy's Life. A first novel. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

giulia &
Old School by Tobias Wolff

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Old School by Tobias Wolff