Critic At Large: Old School

I picked up Old School expecting it to be a typical example of the coming-of-age-at-a-boarding-school genre, but it surprised me with its spare narrative of one boy’s halting journey towards becoming a writer. Tobias Wolff’s semiautobiographical novel, set in a New England boarding school in the early 60’s, doesn’t contain any schoolboy hijinks or tearful moments of self-discovery in which the protagonist realizes he wants to be an artist instead of a physician. Instead, we get a peek at the cloistered lives of a group of precocious boys who are both friends and fierce competitors. The area of competition is a series of writing contests in which the author of the winning entry receives a private audience with a famous author.

The scenes in which the authors visit the school are some of the novel’s most sharply written and funny passages. The narrator’s brief but heady infatuation with the didactic writings of Ayn Rand had me chuckling as much as his sudden disenchantment with her philosophy. Wolff also nicely captures the narcissism and petty rebellions of adolescent boys. Wolff is a careful observer of people and that comes through in every page of the book.