Book review: Tobias Wolff's 'Old School'

Although Tobias Wolff's "Old School" is a novel, many aspects of it are obviously autobiographical. As Wolff said in a recent interview, it is not a memoir, and many of the crucial events were changed, but he could not have written it if he had not lived through some of the same experiences in a school very similar to that of the novel.

The narrator of the book is a young man competing with his schoolmates to win an audience with a famous writer slated to visit their prestigious private school. Wolff makes use of three icons of the 1960s -- Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway -- to examine not only the literature of the era but also the society that engendered and fostered it.

It is hard to envision today's youth becoming so excited or honored by the visit of a famous writer, unless it were the author of some manga or graphic novel. As Wolff pointed out in his interview, "Writers were our rock stars."

The narrator feels out of place at the school because he is half-Jewish and comes from a modest background. Although his schoolmates are not overtly racist or snobbish, he senses that they would act differently toward him if they knew. So, without actually outright lying, he implies by his words and actions that he is one of them.

His longing to belong leads him to an unconscious act of unacceptable behavior that will have far-reaching and unexpected consequences.

The first three chapters of "Old School" were originally published in a slightly different form in The New Yorker, and parts of the novel feel as if they were tacked on as an afterthought. But, by and large, this is a captivating narrative, written with empathy and compassion.

The voice of the young man rings true, especially when he realizes that no matter how long he has lived with his schoolmates, the fundamental differences between them will never allow him to bridge the gap.

When one of his schoolmates is on the verge of being expelled, the narrator realizes that, for him, the experience of having gone to this school was unique and to be treasured, but it was not necessarily so for his friend.

"But Purcell could give it up without a backward glance because to him the years now closing were a story of no importance, if a story at all. He instinctively saw himself as belonging to a narrative so grand that this part of it counted only as transitional material."

Not so for our young hero. He pretended to belong to this world of "sailing expertise, Christmas in St. Anton, inherited box seats, and an easy disregard for all that."

But like Krebs, one of Hemingway's heroes, he felt lost, disoriented, without compass. "Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration. ... In this way he lost everything.

I knew just how Krebs felt."

Most of the events in this book take place in the very early sixties, before the Beatles and rock revolution, before the civil rights marches, women's liberation, and the Vietnam War. The world would change, and people with it.

As Wolff points out, his novel is not a lament for the passing of such a world; it is a portrait of a time that though "arrogant, misogynistic and insular," was also "filled with friendship, and high spirits, and intellectual vitality."

Those friendships, though, were based on kinship of spirit, and limited by disparities of background and circumstances. The intimacy of the narrator with his roommate is superficial, based on sharing a room, classes, sports activities and literary ambitions. They do not confide in each other their common Jewish backgrounds, their inadequacies or their fears and doubts.

While competing for the honor to meet Hemingway, they each suffer from writer's block but pretend to each other that their writing is progressing splendidly.

"We were almost at the end of our years together, and without ever fighting or devilling each other as most other roommates did, we were farther from being friends than on our first day. We had made ourselves unknowable behind our airs and sardonic courtesies, and the one important truth I'd discovered about him (his Jewishness) we'd silently agreed never to acknowledge."

In the midst of rowdy camaraderie, the boys suffer from the deepest loneliness and isolation, the feeling of lying to belong and the knowledge that they don't and never will.

"Old School" is, amazingly enough, Wolff's first novel. He is the author of two acclaimed memoirs, "This Boy's Life" and "In Pharaoh's Army," as well as two collections of stories and a novella, "The Barracks Thief," which won a Pen/Faulkner Award.

("Old School" by Tobias Wolff, Knopf, $22.00, 198 pages.)