Thursday, November 27, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: This writer's life

By John Ziebell

Tobias Wolff, a legend of contemporary letters, is best known for the memoirs This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army. An essayist, teacher and meticulous crafter of short fiction, Wolff is such an established icon it's surprising to see his latest book, Old School, touted as his first novel.

Old School has more in common with the memoirs than with The Barracks Thief, his PEN/Faulkner-winning novella. It's a first-person narrative about, more than anything, becoming a writer. The setting is a private East Coast boys school, presumably similar to the one that the real-life author lied his way into. We recognize its exclusivity by its attributes, from uniform blazers through the vocabulary of wealth to the famed stained glass chapel windows "plundered from France by some sharp alum." The school has "forms" instead of years and provides a direct route to the Ivy League. And no matter how much the headmaster wants it to reflect a perfectible democratic society, propriety is still observed--thank God and the alumni board.

Old School fits neatly between the autobiographical books that chart Wolff's childhood in the Pacific Northwest and his years in Vietnam. The novel comprises less than a calendar year of Later American Dream, but it's a telling window of time; Kennedy had been elected president, and Hemingway had yet to blow his brains out.

Though confessional in tone, the book doesn't invoke the standard boarding school themes of physical discomfort, latent homosexuality made good and the undiagnosed brilliance of the teachers. There's no real discussion of food or sports or the kind of bonding that might, in a couple decades, allow one to team up with lifelong friends and business associates to plunder foreign nations. As unbelievable as it seems now, what Wolff's characters talk about is...literature.

The unnamed school sponsors readings by established writers; at each, based on the merits of a submitted manuscript, one student is selected to meet personally with the visiting author. This competitive worship becomes the book's driving force. Writers once had more celebrity weight than illiterate runway models or sitcom actors, and whether it's within or beyond the limits of autobiography, Wolff could not have come up with three more representative golden calves than Robert Frost, Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway.

Everything we learn about the novel's characters is connected to their still-tentative positions to the world of books, effectively limiting the cast to the school's fledgling literati. We know the boys by the authors who factionalize them, which they imitate with awe and which with affected disdain, by the individual mechanical voices of their typewriters as they toil to produce an effort worthy of winning an audience with a figure of myth. As a premise for a novel, this seems almost arrogantly narrow, but Wolff's mastery can be measured in part by his ability to make the otherwise inconsequential thoughts of a theoretically fictional first-person narrator so mesmerizing.

"A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing," the school headmaster says at one point early in the book. "It can change your life." This is the kind of unforgettably bold statement that really has to earn its place in a novel, and it does, ushering in a narrative resolution packed with contradictory values and conflicting issues that we, the unsuspecting audience, hadn't even considered--an ending that delivers its own truth, however fictional, a blend of pain and poignancy untainted by sentimentality.
Old School

Tobias Wolff

Knopf

196 pages