Old School by Tobias Wolff

I wish I had attended the prep school in this book, where the entire school revolves around the English faculty and the young writers and scholars who love literature. In my high school the faculty and student body revolved around the football coaches and team and cheerleaders. Tobias Wolff attended a prep school much like the one he writes about here, and he has written this most extraordinary book; no writers, great or otherwise, came out of my high school. No professional football players, either.

In the early '60s, the unnamed narrator is in his last year as a scholarship student at his school, although at this school great care is taken to maintain a "classless" atmosphere, so that supposedly nobody knows who has money and who does not. He is also half Jewish, although his last name does not reveal that. And he takes great care to hide both of these facts, perfecting a pose as a privileged-class intellectual. Even with his long-time roommate, he is never really himself, and he feels that with his roommate the same is true. They are always playing out their assumed roles.

This fortunate school has, three times a year, visits from famous writers, and the students submit literary works to be judged by the writer, the reward being a private meeting, to be "anointed" by the great. This year the writers are Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway (the literary hero of the protagonist).

The winner of the Frost meeting has submitted a poem intended to be an homage to Frost, which Frost has perceived as a parody. No win there for the narrator. He feverishly reads The Fountainhead several times in preparation for his submission to Ayn Rand, falling completely under the spell of the book's philosophy and of its larger-than-life characters. But he comes down with some serious flu and does not even submit anything. He does, however, attend the gathering of Rand with the students and faculty, and her reality destroys the fantasy he has built in his mind about superiority and being a "misunderstood loner."

He returns to his idol, Hemingway, and gains a new appreciation for his honesty in revealing human (and his own) inadequacies. And then Hemingway's visit is announced, and the narrator wants desperately to win the audience, but can he write honestly and truthfully, as he perceives that Hemingway did?

The climax of the book answers that question. But then two more sections rather perfunctorily summarize the narrator's life after prep school and tell an additional part of the story of school days that he missed while there. These sections seemed weak and very anti-climactic.

The school-experience part of this novel was absolutely accurate and true, conveying the almost universal behavior of teenagers as they adopt "roles": the jock, the prom queen, the dork, the weirdo, the rebel. (Remember The Breakfast Club?) In this case, the roles are the rich kid, the intellectual, the budding writer, but they are roles just the same.

For someone who was briefly seduced by Ayn Rand and who later realized how Nazi-like her philosophy is (that would be me), the depiction of her visit is worth the price of the book alone.

But this is mainly a book for writers--about writing "the truth," no matter how painful or revealing that may be. And for avid readers who appreciate truthful writing.