By Mary von Tamelen
 Tobias Wolff |
“Old School” is an engaging novel, short and profound. In it, Tobias Wolff tells the story of a boy’s self-discovery, while also probing the questions of honesty and deception. “Old School” (Knopf, 2003) was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist as well as a New York Times Notable Book.
The narrator is a scholarship boy from the West, thrilled to be a student at an elite Eastern school in 1960. He readily becomes a part of the school, mingling easily with his more privileged classmates.
“Ours was not a snobbish school,” he says, “or so it believed …”
However, he notes later, “If the school had a snobbery it would confess to, this was its pride in being a literary place - quite aside from the glamorous writers who visited three times a year.”
Most of the students - along with the narrator - are budding writers, and the story involves the competition for a private audience with each of the three visiting writers, to be given to the student whose story the visiting writer selects.
Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, Ernest Hemingway - impressive visitors indeed! We see and feel the intensity of the competition among the boys to meet the writers. Wolff’s portrayal of both the visitors and the boys, along with their compositions and the process of creating them, is masterly. Faculty members, too, are vividly dissected. It is pure delight to read about Frost’s visit to the school and his reactions, with the boys and their teachers working to impress the poet.
The novel is about deception - self-deception above all - on many levels, by many characters. Its plot is simple and compelling, smoothly readable, yet emotionally complex. The book has undercurrents of snobbery and class consciousness, pride and shame. When does genuine honesty become destructive?
Wolff is in the writing department at Stanford University. He is probably best known for “This Boy’s Life: A Memoir,” made into a film starring Robert de Niro, and “In Pharaoh’s Army” and his short story collections.
He is scheduled to give a lecture 4-5:30 p.m., April 15, at the Los Altos Youth Center as part of the Los Altos Library Endowment’s Speaking Volumes series.
The event is free and open to the public. The Youth Center is located at 1 N. San Antonio Road, Los Altos.
