Huh. I really didn't get this. On a sentence level, the novel is clearly well-crafted.

However, the story completely failed to engage me. I'm rather skeptical of writers who write fiction about writers or writing.

But I can accept it if it's done well, like anything else, of course.

Yet this one seemed particularly grievous. Or, if not grievous, then simply distracting.

For example, when the boys talk about manuscripts submitted to the school's lit review, about why this story isn't working or this story is, I couldn't help but picture Wolff himself in the workshop, or in his office, reading a student's successful-or-else-not story.

I was taken out of the narrative and could see Wolff putting the words on the page. It was just too this-is-my-life-thinly-veiled-as-fiction.

"I finished the story just before the bell rang for breakfast. I read it through and fixed a few typos, but otherwise it needed no correction. It was done." Eh. Convenient, cliché, ineloquent, and all too now.

This is a story about children, though it doesn't, for the bulk of the novel, attempt to be anything else.

For the first hundred and twenty or so pages, it's just a bunch of precocious and erudite high-schoolers worrying about getting to meet Ayn Rand or Robert Frost.

I found Wolff's portrait of Rand humorous, but also predictable, obvious, and over-the-top.

The narrator is well-drafted and has a consistent, engaging, sympathetic voice.

But he remains, for most of the novel, just a character. Just a kid. He never really came to life for me.

There's also this strange, overarching but completely underdeveloped deal about him being Jewish, and yet raised Catholic and yet ashamed of his Jewish ancestry(?), and yet sympathetic with his Jewish schoolmates and yet afraid to admit that he too is Jewish and yet sometimes willing to sort of tell or hint to some people that he sort of is, actually, Jewish?

I didn't understand the reticence w/r/t that part of his life/character. It didn't make a difference to the story whether he was or wasn't Jewish, and yet it kept coming up in this weird, under-explained, almost secretive way.

I just kept thinking while reading this, "Yeah, OK, I've already read A Separate Peace," during which novel I kept thinking "Yeah, OK, I've already read The Catcher in the Rye."

Much to my chagrin, though, this novel became even more Catcheresque after its climax.

So at one point our daring narrator completely plagiarizes another story and turns it in to the Hemingway contest.

As he's doing this, as he's copying the story, I'm thinking, "Hoah, boy, you're really doing this? You're really going to turn in a plagiarized story? To Hemingway, no less? Phew! Ballsy."

Yet he never once considers what he does plagiarizing. Really? This is a bright kid we're talking about here.

I didn't buy that there wouldn't once be a "What if they find out?" thought that runs through his head.

So when he does get caught, is the reader supposed to be as surprised as he is? Because I sure wasn't.

I felt like Wolff was asking the reader not to consider the possibility that the narrator is plagiarizing, and have it be this shocking revelation when he gets caught.

I was just like, "Dude, duh you got caught. You copied a published story. What did you think?"

Thereafter, the story speeds up and covers a bunch more ground—narrator goes to Vietnam, has kids, etc. etc.

Something else that bothered me, though, was how Mr. Ramsey reveals that there was more to the narrator's big day than he knows but then doesn't say WHAT this is, and the reader is left hanging.

Wolff actually leaves us hanging twice on this point. So I'm thinking it must be some huge deal for the author to be so coy about it, which coyness was annoying.

OK, so then we do finally get the whole story, but AND HOW. The final fifteen pages of the novel completely drop our main character and reveal the whole truth of that day.

But the story wholly concerns the school's headmaster, who has been (or was previously) an important character only insofar as a school needs a headmaster.

I just wasn't sure why we needed this protracted story of the headmaster's life after resigning; I simply didn't care, and was untouched by the novel's final scene, in which he triumphantly returns to his beloved school.

Frustrating.

Tobias Wolff draws the reader into the typically American universe of prep-schools (not colleges as erroneously reported on the back cover), that is, the boarding schools where adolescents are prepared for university.

The setting lends itself flexibly to an oblique coming-of-age novel, which is above all a reflection on literature (strictly American) and on writing. Wolff's manifesto is simple: intellectual honesty is the first tool that the writer must learn to use, in art as in public and private life.

The author puts his idea into practice with witty and often shrewd pages, showing how the right dose of pity for one's characters serves to make them even more authentic. Hilarious are the interludes with Robert Frost and Ayn Rand; Wolff takes advantage of Frost to describe how the reverential fear towards the masters can lead to humiliation, and how an aura of sacral authority can generate critical flattening. In the case of Rand, the intention is openly satirical, but Wolff does not fail to provide his target with a sufficient dose of dignity.

There are some common elements with The Last of the Savages by Jay McInerney, also set in a prep-school in the Sixties.

The aforementioned back cover contains a big spoiler.

The story initially commences in a rather promising manner. It features renowned literary figures such as Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Hemingway as characters. This section manages to capture the reader's attention and holds the potential for an engaging narrative.

However, once this part concludes, the subsequent characters introduced lack the necessary strength and interest. They are unable to effectively carry forward the already somewhat flimsy story. The plot seems to lose its momentum and fails to maintain the level of excitement and intrigue that was established in the beginning.

Perhaps more development and depth could have been added to these remaining characters to make them more compelling and capable of driving the story forward. As it stands, the story struggles to maintain its coherence and fails to fully satisfy the reader's expectations.

Overall, while the start shows promise, the lackluster nature of the subsequent characters and the thinness of the story ultimately detract from its overall quality.

How enchanting and sweet this world of the novel was for me. In my opinion, it had all the characteristics of a good novel. Although the last chapter was an inappropriate conclusion and could have been better:

"The life that causes writing cannot be brought onto paper. That life without the author knowing it goes forward. Free from mental distractions and turmoil, in the deep and dark gutters where shadowy memories fight for us there, they pull each other out and in the end, when a few of them remain and appear before our eyes, but they are faced with the same unceremonious encounter as the waiters when bringing an extra cup of coffee. No specific explanation is given as to how and why someone becomes a writer, just as it cannot be said from a specific time; this is the very moment when I became a writer."

Hot damn!

I do realize that this book was on my 'currently-reading' shelf for an extremely long stretch of time. However, I must confess that I had only done a cursory read of a few pages.

Well, last night, I visited the land of IKEA (a dreadful place that I rarely venture to) and bought myself a reading lamp. Eager to try out my latest device, I picked up this book and began to read. This was at Midnight, as I'm a bit of a night owl.

Well, I got so completely engrossed in this book that I read the entire thing! I finished around 4 in the morning and then had a rather strange dream about Hemingway. In the dream, he was selling me ice cream by the side of the road while confiding to me his darkest secrets. Unfortunately, when I awoke, I couldn't remember what these secrets were. Boo!

So, anyway, getting back to the point, if there was one. This is truly a great book that beautifully captures the mood and spirit of a certain time and of the way it feels to be infatuated with words and literature.

Now I have this strong urge to put on some oxfords, a cord blazer, grab a pile of Hemingway and Faulkner, and go read in an old musty library somewhere. It sounds absolutely delicious!

I didn't realize this book was a novel and not a memoir until after finishing it.

(The same thing happened to me when I read Memoirs of a Geisha in high school.) Since I usually read on my Kindle, I tend to dive into books oblivious to the helpful signposts screaming “Novel ahead!” on covers. Oh well.

Our unnamed narrator is in his senior year at an upper-crust all-boys prep/boarding school in the Northeast in 1960. His family can only afford the tuition thanks to a scholarship. The school is also an incubator for the literary ambitions of many wannabe writers-in-training. It has a tradition of inviting famous writers to visit three times each year. Boys in their final year compete in a short story or poetry contest judged by the visiting luminary. The prize is an hour-long private stroll around the school’s garden with the writer. Willing to do anything to win, the narrator submits a piece that is at once shockingly false and the truest thing he’s ever written, the truest thing he, at this fledgling stage, knows how to write.

Wolff has an effortless writing style that makes it easy to forget that you’re reading at all. The writing is warm and sympathetic, wonderfully channeling the highs and lows of the literary life. The joy of reading and the anxiety of writing are palpable. The constant search for and reassessment of truth inherent in the writer’s life is prominent. There's the conscious and unconscious plagiarism of other authors’ work, the simultaneous self-doubt and self-aggrandizement, the exploitation of others’ stories to tell one’s own, the half-truths that go uncorrected, the conflicting estrangement and need to fit in, the petty envy and obsession with others’ success. The cultivation of the creative persona is romanticized but very engrossing. It draws the reader in and makes them feel as if they are part of the narrator's literary journey.

A review dedicated to and inspired by my friend Eh!, who reads things backwards.

This book is truly literary meta. It is so meta that there are prerequisite reading requirements for an optimal experience. Everyone is familiar with Robert Frost, right? So, I'm not including him on the list. However, I require you to read "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway, and (if you liked "The Sun Also Rises", but not if you hated it) "A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway before you read "Old School". If you don't care for Hemingway, you'll probably not be interested in this book. But, it might still be worth reading for the "Atlas Shrugged" joke. You might think that sounds like a lot of work, but you should be reading those books anyway, so I don't know what you're complaining about. If you don't want the reading prerequisites, "This Boy's Life" by Tobias Wolff is just as good and relies a lot less on the meta.

I'm pretty sure Wolff was monitoring my literary preferences through a satellite feed at his office in Stanford while he was writing this. This book is the definitive description of how I feel about reading and writing and literature and fame, authors I love and authors I hate. Maybe it's how I feel about everything I consider important in life. I'm convinced that it was written to me. To add to the meta of this book, when I met Wolff some years back, the experience was exactly what he describes of himself meeting authors. There always seems to be a cream pie for me to faceplant into when I meet authors.

I think Tobias Wolff, both his fictional self in this book and his memoir self in others, is a sort of Holden Caulfield, if Holden was born poor and on the West Coast. To me, that means that he is lovely and a genius. He's also probably scrappier than Holden, though I think Holden has his own version of urban scrappiness. Even though "Old School" is all about boys, and women only appear in weird fun-house-mirror shapes, I still find the characters identifiable. They are boys, but they are not just that – they are writers and students.

I'm a devoted fan of modernism and spare writing, and it strikes me that some of the more clean, modernist writers alive today write memoirs. I'm thinking of Jeannette Walls and Tobias Wolff. Not that two writers make a trend, but I can't think of any current fiction writers I have read that edit with the skill those two have. I guess, most modernism has a coming-of-age feeling of crushed narcissism and idolatry, and that is something that fills my heart up every time. It's that laughter and tears recipe like a hearty meal. I absolutely love it.

Anyway, this book basically picks up where "This Boy's Life" leaves off in the story of Tobias Wolff's life, so it might be best to read that one first. I read this first, and I still didn't guess the end of the other, so I don't necessarily think it's terrible to read this one first if you've done your necessary literary background reading. Mostly, this book is a tribute to some wonderful authors who have had a hand in shaping American literature. If you don't know the authors, I'd think reading this would be a little like watching the Oscars without having seen any of the movies up for awards. You can still do it and be entertained by the song and dance, but you don't have that investment at the moment they announce that Brittany Spears is a better actress than Meryl Streep, or some such.

It was no This Boy’s Life.

This statement holds a certain significance.

Perhaps it implies that the experience or situation being referred to did not resemble the events or atmosphere depicted in the book or movie titled This Boy’s Life.

It could suggest that there were differences in the challenges faced, the emotions felt, or the overall narrative.

Maybe the person making this comment expected something more similar to the story but instead found something entirely different.

Or perhaps they are simply making a comparison to emphasize the uniqueness of their own experience.

Whatever the reason, this simple sentence conveys a sense of contrast and individuality.

And that’s all I have to say about it.

It leaves the reader with a bit of mystery, wondering what exactly led to this conclusion and what the true nature of the experience was.

I've been a bit distracted lately, which has led to this rather short novel taking me a while to complete.

I believe that if I had read it more continuously, I would have derived greater enjoyment from it. As it stands, the interrupted reading disrupted the flow to some extent, and it took me a while each time to become fully absorbed in the story.

The story itself is somewhat lacking in excitement (though this isn't necessarily a negative aspect). However, the author has crafted the characters with great thought and a certain degree of convincingness. The prose, too, is highly skillful: it is delicate and subtle, yet also has moments of brilliance and tangentiality, demanding a great deal of focus to avoid missing the author's poignant musings.

While I wouldn't choose to read this novel again, I do appreciate having had the opportunity to read it. It has offered me some insights and a different reading experience.

Overall, despite its flaws, it has its merits and has contributed to my literary journey.

WOW... this is an incredibly fine book. The writing within these pages is truly amazing. In fact, I firmly believe that the most effective way to convince you all that this Wolff fellow is "a beast," as today's kids would put it, is to directly quote some passages right here.

"The heat from the fire brought a flush to her face and made her perfume thicker, headier. She turned to Mr. Rice, an English master and a southerner himself, who was tapping his ashes from his pipe into the fireplace. Do you think she'll come tonight? she asked."

"Patty was his second wife, a friend of my grandmother's who'd married him after Grandmargie died. Patty was boring too. She read him the day's news while he peered at the crossword puzzle through his half-moon glasses. They say they're going to widen the road where the car went off with all those kids. She had covered the floors of their house in thick white carpets that deadened the air and made whatever you said in that woolen silence sound like the sudden caw of a crow on a damp day."

"Though never overtly so, his responses were much more destructive than Purcell's. They left you feeling dazed, flatfooted. It was exactly the way he played squash - never slamming the ball head-on, like I did, but breezily tapping it through some sly angle so it died in the corner."

"We had made ourselves unknowable behind our airs and sardonic courtesies, and the one important truth I'd discovered about him we'd silently agreed never to acknowledge. Many such agreements had evolved between us. No acknowledgment of who we really were - of trouble, weakness or doubt - of our worries about our life ahead and the sort of men we were becoming. Never; not a word. We'd kept everything witty and cool, until the air between us was so ironized that to say anything in earnest would have been a breach of manners, even of trust."

SEE! I had to copy his words down just to get a sense of his rhythm, his mastery with language (just like the narrator in the book does to get an idea for the prose of Hemingway.) Anyway, this is the best book I've read since Revolutionary Road, and Wolff's style here reminded me a great deal of Yates's throughout his novel. If you're seeking an action-packed, highly entertaining, plot-driven whirlwind of a read, this isn't the book for you. However, if you relish sinking into excellent writing and allowing the characters and story to simply wash over you, then by all means read this. Do it right now. Go ahead and embark on this literary journey.

Excellent book.

So, this book is about a boy's boarding school. The narrator, who is on the school newspaper, writes various things. The school has a strong literary focus and has managed to hook up some very interesting masters and headmasters. They are so persuasive that they convince the famous poet Robert Frost to visit. Many of the boys in the school are passionate about writing poems, and Frost will choose the winner. The lucky winner will be awarded an audience with Frost and will become the envy of all his peers.

Then, Ayn Rand comes to visit the school. She is an eccentric figure. I particularly love the part where she is answering questions at a talk. Here is the exchange:

Headmaster: Miss Rand, you take a rather dim view of your fellow writers.

Ayn Rand: Yes. What other view do they offer?

Headmaster: I think there are quite a few. But let me ask you this. If you had to name the single greatest work by an American author, what would it be?

Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged.

Headmaster: Your own novel. Is there another?

Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead.

Hahahahahahahahaha.

Anyway, this book is like a dessert read. It's like a bowl of delicious blueberry ice cream on a hot summer day. It's truly mouthwatering. (That doesn't mean it's all just happy and sugary. It also has its devastating parts, which are equally amazing. The ending is really surprising. You're definitely going to love it.)

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