Tobias Wolff is best know for the memoir This Boy’s Life. Although a novel, Old School continues to draw on events in Wolff’s own life. Like the unnamed narrator in the novel, Wolff received a scholarship to attend and then was expelled from a New England prep school.
The all-boys boarding school in Old School prides itself on lack of snobbery, but the narrator, a scholarship boy who is half-Jewish, senses he is different from his fellow students who take privilege for granted. He carves out a niche among the literature zealots—students who in 1960 idolize writers as students today idolize rock stars and professional athletes. Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway are due to visit the school, and writing competitions will determine which lucky student gets a private audience with each of the literary icons. Happening upon a short story about a prep-school girl’s disguising her Jewish identity, the narrator feels it speaks his own truth. He changes the names and submits the story as his own, barely aware that he’s plagiarizing. He is caught out and expelled.
Years later and a published writer, the narrator is invited back to the school to speak. One expects the novel to conclude with an all's-forgiven reception there. Instead there is a story about another act of dishonesty related to the narrator’s own. On the day of the narrator's expulsion, the dean who would have been the one to expel him had abruptly left the school because he hadn't corrected a misperception that he was Hemingway's friend. The reader is left to ponder the nature of authenticity, true and false personas, and honor.
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