Old School - Tobias Wolff

     Don't you love it when you stumble across a book that you know nothing about and fall in love with it?  That's what happened to me with Tobias Wolff's Old School.  I was attracted to the cover, saw that it was a Pen/Faulkner finalist, and decided to give it a try.  I was not disappointed.

     The novel is set in a boys' New England prep school in the early 1960's where life revolves around literature.  Each year the school hosts visiting writers and the boys are allowed to compete for a private audience with the writer by composing a poem or story.  The entries are judged in advanced by the visiting writer, making the selection of the winner an even greater honor.  Inevitably, the competitions are fiercely competitive and the boys calculating and conniving in their pursuit of the coveted prize.

     The narrator, a boy from a less prominent background hiding his Jewish ancestry, wants to become a writer and desperately desires to win an audience with one of the visiting writers.  After failing to win an audience with Robert Frost and Ayn Rand, he is determined to win the chance to meet his hero, Ernest Hemingway.  The dean of the school is thought to be a friend of Hemingway's from World War I and the writer's visit is anxiously anticipated.  As the boy struggles to compose the winning story, he is faced with writer's block.  He finally finds his "voice" and his inspiration through imitation.  When his story is selected by Hemingway, the honor is short-lived.  He finds himself disgraced and his life is changed forever.  Only years later learns of another's fall from grace at the same time.

     The book is an homage to literature and the literary life.  It's a concise little treasure of a novel that carries weighty themes of honesty, identity, friendship, shame, and redemption.  It is definitely a book for book-lovers, would-be writers, and those who see writing as an essential part of who we are as humans.

~ Frances