Old School : Tobias Wolff

                                        Image Credit: Ivy-Style-League
I seem to be reading a lot of 'coming of age' books recently. Old School by Tobias Wolff was one of them. The protagonist of Wolff's novel is an unnamed high-school senior - a boy, who is one an unnamed elite prep school. Wikipedia calls the school a 'literary fantasy camp' and for good reason.

Chief among the pursuits at this school are boys wanting to be writers. To aid them in this pursuit, the school has a literary contest, and the prize that everyone hankers after is a meeting with an elite writer. Through the course of the book we see Robert Frost and Ayn Rand visit the school with their odd, jumbled mix of sense, wisdom and utter nonsense even. Take this instance when Ayn Rand is shown to be a despicable cruel monster feminist who shatters the narrator's Howard Roark phase :

"Boys! Please! You are born to be giants, not sacrifices to some ... brainless slattern worrying about the next payment on the refrigerator"

Things build up with the announcement of a visit by Hemingway. The author of the Old Man and the Sea is by now the narrator's favorite - and that prompts him to finally attempt a story that is true to his self - a story that tears away the facade of frailty that his previous stories had. The result of that? I won't spoil the book for you by revealing that - but it was precisely at this point that the story left me. I don't like books that thrust some unformed character on you late in the story. And the last few chapters of this book weave in the story of the Dean. Why? I was perplexed. I didn't care about the Dean, I am pretty sure the narrator didn't care much about him either, and there didn't seem to be that much of a mystery to the Dean that the writer should have felt compelled to explain.

The Boston Globe calls this particular insertion so late in the story a 'skeleton' that lacks the clout that marks most of Wolff's short fiction. "The result is that the stories that compose the first half of "Old School" are considerably more potent than the tales that fill out the novel," says Chris Bohjalian, the reviewer. I cannot agree more. Why, oh why, do writers act too intelligent sometimes? :-). Intelligence sometimes mars a book. More than lack of sense does.

Verdict: Read it for a glimpse into a perceived classic of American literature and forget about the ending.

Rating : 3/5