Old School (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Readers may initially think they have wandered into a quiet and familiar tale of one boy’s alienation at an elite prep school, but Old School quickly becomes a fictional metaphor for the demands, passions, and dangers of artistic imagination.

The narrator of the story is a young scholarship student struggling to fit in, on several levels, at a New England boarding school. The school celebrates the reading and writing of literature, and the social desirability of the heroic individual, by inviting students to compete in a series of story-writing contests. The winning entries in these contests are chosen by famous writers who also happen to be en route to visit the school. The boy who writes the winning story has the cherished honor of a “private audience” with the famous writer.

Tobias Wolff follows the narrator and his cohorts through three such contests, steadily revealing intense undercurrents of ambition, hope, and artistic conformity among the aspiring writers. The novel is structured around visits to the school by a bemused Robert Frost, the intellectually frenetic (and hilariously drawn) Ayn Rand, and the brooding Ernest Hemingway, whose pending arrival sparks the narrator to make a series of costly existential decisions about his writing, his life, and ultimately, his deepest identity.

Old School takes readers to a world where time, identity, art, and consciousness appear on an ever-shifting landscape. Nothing is sure. The book is gently written and profoundly unsettling, in the best sense of the word.

Review Sources

Booklist 100, no. 1 (September 1, 2003): 9.

Kirkus Reviews 71, no. 17 (September 1, 2003): 1100.

Library Journal 128, no. 18 (November 1, 2003): 126-127.

The New York Times Book Review, November 23, 2003, p. 12.

Publishers Weekly 250, no. 41 (October 13, 2003): 57.

Time 162, no. 22 (December 1, 2003): 98.