Another in my run of university/school-themed novels, Tobias Wolff’s Old School is, on the face of it, a rehashing of the standard “working class protagonist gets scholarship to elite institution and observes the rich kids’ lives” trope. The plot centres around a 1960s boarding school, a clique of 6th form budding writers, the school magazine, and guest writers who come to give speeches and “advice”. I really enjoyed the portrayal of these adolescents all trying to write like Hemingway – it’s inconceivable today, even in an elite institution; even at my (elite) university, the English Lit students were almost completely uninterested in reading, let alone in learning how to think or write.

Wolff really captures the sense of excitement some feel with novels; that great literature is wisdom literature. Although Wolff demeaned himself by jumping aboard the “Trump is literally Hitler!” train, one can forgive him because he has a Beowulf ‘stache and a great face, like an old rain-worn statue, and after all Old School is partly about the disjunction between the writer as man and the writer as book.

Look at that ‘stache. That’s a ‘stache that means business.

I especially relished the description of Robert Frost and Ayn Rand visiting the school; Rand is simply ghastly, strident & self-mythological for all her insight & intellect. There’s also a fine portrayal of the schoolmasters, their life bonded to the school and the pupils; their difficulty in forming a self separate from their role as teacher. The narrative control is impressive, the focus mostly on the boy protagonist and his peers, but then effortlessly flickering onto the teachers; for example, a teacher who quits the school:

In former times Arch had supposed that his sense of being a distinctive and valuable man proceeded from his own qualities, and that they would sustain him in that confidence wherever he happened to be. He’d never imagined that this surety was conferred on him by others, by their knowing and cherishing him. But so it was. Unrecognised, he had become a ghost, even to himself.

I was forearmed against the book by the surname, “Wolff”. I wearily imagined a kind of Philip Roth “look at how Jewish I am!” exercise, but while the protagonist’s Jewish background drives the plot & character development, it’s not too obtrusive, or not obnoxiously so. I was reminded, subtly, of The Great Gatsby, another story about a (presumably) Jewish parvenu and self-mythologiser in WASP-world. The subtleness is the thing here – I probably wouldn’t have noticed Gatsby is most likely Jewish were I not in the habit of Noticing; and likewise with Wolff’s novel, the narrator doesn’t really think of himself as Jewish, so only experiences a mild sense of friction, of unbelonging in the WASPy school – but that mild friction generates, as it were, a pearl. Deception, illusion, a metamorphic & chameleon self, is so central to the protagonist’s Jewish being, that his very attempt to articulate his unbelonging becomes deceit: he plagiarises another Jewish writer’s short story because it so clearly expresses his own unease and pretense; pretending to be another pretender, to confess his pretense. All too circumvoluted and frankly Jewish for the Anglo-Saxons, it’s perfect matter for a novel.