Old School (novel)


Old School is a novel by Tobias Wolff. It was first published on November 4, 2003, after three portions of the novel had appeared in The New Yorker as short stories.

Plot

The book is narrated by a school senior at an unnamed elite boarding school in the northeastern United States in 1960–61. The unnamed protagonist is a scholarship student who comes from a middle-class family.
He aspires to be a writer, and the school he attends is an embodiment of a certain kind of academic fantasy, where non-English masters "floated at the fringe of circle, as if warming themselves at a fire," and literature is still believed to hold the key to the soul. Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway, with each of whom the narrator crosses paths, appear in the story, dispensing wisdom, pseudo-wisdom, vitriol. These literary appearances amount to creative satires of these authors, especially Ayn Rand. The novel revolves around themes of adolescence, class, and the role of literature.
The Penguin Random House publisher's blurb describes the book thus:
In his review for the New York Times, critic A.O. Scott writes that Old School is "about nothing if not the making of a writer — though it is also, just as plainly, about a writer's failure."

Reception

This book was a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
The review for Old School in the Los Angeles Times noted, "...Wolff again proves himself a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve."
The novel was chosen as a National Endowment for the Arts "Big Read" book for communities to read together. The Libraries of Greater Kansas City chose Old School as their Big Read in 2009.