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A review by hernamewaslily
Old School by Tobias Wolff
3.0
Though officially a novel, surprisingly the first from a writer as prolific as Tobias Wolff, ‘Old School’ could easily be considered a thinly veiled memoir, though it may be more apt (and fashionable) to call it an exercise in auto-fiction, detailing the author’s own school days.
The novel is narrated by an unnamed man, looking back at his time at an elite East Coast prep school during the 1960s (an experience also shared by Wolff – though, unlike the unnamed narrator who got into the school on a scholarship, Wolff instead fabricated his application, transcripts, and letters of recommendation to get in which was eventually discovered and led to Wolff’s expulsion). Every few months at this elite school that focuses on the literary arts, an author is invited to give a talk. Upon winning the writing competition held in the author’s honour, one student gets a private audience with them. When the narrator, a studious senior and aspiring writer, discovers that his favourite author, Ernest Hemmingway is scheduled to visit and that he might have the chance to meet him, the narrator suffers a lapse in judgment that jeopardises his entire academic career.
With ‘Old School,’ Wolff has crafted a compelling tale about the power of literature, not least through his pertinent observations of such authors as Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Hemmingway, but also through his meta-commentary on the fictionalisation of the self, which functions on two levels: Wolff’s fictionalisation of his biography and his protagonist’s fictionalisation of their identity as both a person and a writer.
On a sentence level, the book excels with literary prowess (unsurprising considering that Wolff taught creative writing at Syracuse University – where George Saunders was one of his students – and has been teaching creative writing at Stanford University since 1997), and some lovely literary analyses are woven nicely into the narrative that draws on and heightens the academic themes of the text.
This novel, however, is not without its faults. It took too long for the story to get going. Although enjoyable, Wolff spent too long on exposition than on the story and the novel suffered because of that. Similarly, towards the end of the novel, the shift in perspective was disorientating and unnecessary.
Nonetheless, much of the novel was enjoyable to read and something to keep my appetite in Academica whetted. A good campus novel for the literary inclined.
The novel is narrated by an unnamed man, looking back at his time at an elite East Coast prep school during the 1960s (an experience also shared by Wolff – though, unlike the unnamed narrator who got into the school on a scholarship, Wolff instead fabricated his application, transcripts, and letters of recommendation to get in which was eventually discovered and led to Wolff’s expulsion). Every few months at this elite school that focuses on the literary arts, an author is invited to give a talk. Upon winning the writing competition held in the author’s honour, one student gets a private audience with them. When the narrator, a studious senior and aspiring writer, discovers that his favourite author, Ernest Hemmingway is scheduled to visit and that he might have the chance to meet him, the narrator suffers a lapse in judgment that jeopardises his entire academic career.
With ‘Old School,’ Wolff has crafted a compelling tale about the power of literature, not least through his pertinent observations of such authors as Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Hemmingway, but also through his meta-commentary on the fictionalisation of the self, which functions on two levels: Wolff’s fictionalisation of his biography and his protagonist’s fictionalisation of their identity as both a person and a writer.
On a sentence level, the book excels with literary prowess (unsurprising considering that Wolff taught creative writing at Syracuse University – where George Saunders was one of his students – and has been teaching creative writing at Stanford University since 1997), and some lovely literary analyses are woven nicely into the narrative that draws on and heightens the academic themes of the text.
This novel, however, is not without its faults. It took too long for the story to get going. Although enjoyable, Wolff spent too long on exposition than on the story and the novel suffered because of that. Similarly, towards the end of the novel, the shift in perspective was disorientating and unnecessary.
Nonetheless, much of the novel was enjoyable to read and something to keep my appetite in Academica whetted. A good campus novel for the literary inclined.