Wolff - Old School

I love Tobias Wolff. I adored his two memoirs, In The Pharoah's Army and This Boys Life. I love his writing style and his particular voice. I love reading interviews with him. I love his mustache. I did not, however, love his novel Old School.

Wolff's Old School is not the novelization of the Animal House-like movie Old School. They are two different things. It pains me to say this, but I enjoyed the Luke Wilson/Vince Vaughn/Will Ferrell movie more than I enjoyed this book. I'm sorry Tobias Wolff. Forgive me.

Old School is a semi autobiographical novel about a boy in an American boarding school where budding writers compete mercilessly for the annual top prize - a chance to go for a walk with a famous visiting writer. The book, the characters and the various incidents clearly seemed meaningful to the author, but I don't think that they had any impact on me at all. I never really cared about or understood the characters, and the often rambling narrative never engaged me. Weirdly, I just kept reading out of a sense of obligation to the author.

Halfway through the book I started thinking that there is a terrible possibility that your experience at a school or in war or wherever could have had profound meaning to you, but might not have any real shape as a story to be read by others. Is this why people zone out the moment I begin recounting exciting incidents from my life? What you see as a coherent whole is really, to everyone else, just a bunch of random stuff that happened.

It was strange at times how much this book reminded me of other novels. A teacher's flakey wife seems tantalizingly close to the "saint" Mary Dempster in Robertson Davies' Fifth Business. But she disappears a few pages later without us really getting to know her. The boarding school setting recalls a million British novels like Harry Potter and most recently (to me) Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. (Is every boarding school experience so profound? Damn my plebeian public school education!!)

There were some elements of the book that I enjoyed. The failure of the characters to meaningfully connect with each other even after spending years together rang painfully true.

"No acknowledgement of who we really were - of troubles, weakness, or doubt -- of our worries about the life ahead and the sorts 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 trust."

And the internal dialogue of the main character sometimes read as if it was written by an author who had finally gained some wisdom into the workings of his own complicated mind.

"I saw that she was an extraordinary person, and that i had nothing to offer her but an hour or so of good company, which proved easier once I no longer felt the tension of hope."

What I enjoyed in the novel was the examination of how much we live in our own heads but really feed and thrive off our connection with others. More than so many of life's mysteries, not knowing what is going on in other people's heads is so fundamental to our every day experience of the world. Old School does a great job of illustrating this idea and takes it one step further. In the end, as much as the minds of others are a mystery to us, often times we have very little idea what the hell is going on in our own heads.

So yes, there is a lot of good in this book. But unfortunately these small pleasures were not enough to make me love it.