Lessons learned in ‘Old School’

TOBIAS WOLFF’S seventh book is a novel, but it could understandably be mistaken for nonfiction from an author best known for his acclaimed memoirs “This Boy’s Life” and “In Pharaoh’s Army.” His latest, “Old School,” has its own autobiographical elements: Set at an anonymous New England prep school, it is a coming-of-age tale as well as a meditation on creativity, ambition and the writing life.

The narrator of “Old School,” who is never named, tells his story in the same gentle, reserved, graceful voice with which Wolff has unraveled the stories of his life. As the author did, the narrator attends an all-boys’ private school, a place where he doesn’t quite fit in. The boy is a scholarship student, not from an affluent family like most of his peers. In longing to be accepted, he resorts to deception that ultimately lands him in big trouble and forces him on a very different path. (Wolff once bluffed his way into an elite Pennsylvania school by fabricating his application, transcripts and reference letters.) The novel opens in 1960, and the narrator notes that the imminent visit of poet Robert Frost has “cooked up more interest than the contest between Nixon and Kennedy.” The faculty and students on this hermetic campus care far more about literature than politics or sports. “If the school had a snobbery it would confess to,” he says, “this was its pride in being a literary place -- quite aside from the glamorous writers who visited three times a year.”

The narrator, like nearly every other student, yearns to win one of the school’s writing contests, judged by prominent visiting authors -- such as Frost, Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren and Ayn Rand -- and resulting in a highly coveted private meeting with that author. “I’m not exaggerating the importance to us of these trophy meetings,” he says. “We cared.” These contests create an atmosphere of barely suppressed tension, each student sizing up his worthy contenders. The narrator lacks the aloof, cool confidence of his wealthy peers, with “their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world, that it had already been reserved for them.” For him, writing is the sole means of proving his net worth. Winning a private session with an author he admires is beyond priceless, his only hope of trumping his upper-class schoolmates. “My aspirations were mystical,” he confesses. “I wanted to receive the laying on of hands that had written living stories or poems, hands that had touched the hands of other writers. I wanted to be anointed.”

In an era in which being on a reality TV show is considered something worth aiming for, there’s a certain quaintness to a novel about a teenager striving not only to write but to become someone who has written. In lesser hands, such a story might be pretentious, too old-fashioned or uninteresting. Yet “Old School” is as much about the shaping of character as it is about the shaping of a writer and exposes the kind of class-based phoniness that Holden Caulfield so famously detested. Wolff questions what it means to be “the real thing,” both as a writer and as a person of honor and integrity. “How do you begin to write truly?” the narrator wonders. Grievous mistakes often provoke drastic changes in life, but it takes years for the narrator to grasp the cost of such mistakes, even when no harm was intended

Yet he knows that goodness may be overrated: “For a writer there is no such thing as an exemplary life. It’s a fact that certain writers do good work at the bottom of a bottle. The outlaws generally write as well as the bankers, though more briefly. Some writers flourish like opportunistic weeds by hiding among the citizens, others by toughing it out in one sort of desert or another.”

Wolff doesn’t romanticize artists, and he pokes fun at those who regard themselves too seriously. He makes no grand conclusions about the authenticity of a writer’s identity. “The life that produces writing can’t be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind’s business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way.”

In “Old School,” 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.