Old School - Hardcover

The unnamed narrator is one of several boys whose life revolves around the school's English teachers, those polymaths who seemed to know "exactly what was most worth knowing". For the boys, literature is the centre of life, and their obsession culminates in a series of literary competitions during their final year. The prize in each is a private audience with a visiting writer who serves as judge for the entries.

At first the narrator is entirely taken with the battle. As he fails in his effort to catch Robert Frost's attention and then is unable--due to illness--to even compete for his moment with Ayn Rand, he devotes his energies to a masterpiece for his hero, Hemingway. But, confronting the blank page, the narrator discovers his cowardice, his duplicity. He has withheld himself, he realises, even from his roommate. He has used his fiction to create a patrician gentility, a mask for his middle-class home and his Jewish ancestry. Through the competition for Hemingway, fittingly, all of his illusions about literature dissolve.

Near the end of the novel, the narrator imagines that he might one day write about his school days. But he is daunted. "Memory", he says, "is a dream to begin with, and what I had was a dream of memory, not to be put to the test". Old School enters this interplay between dreams and the adult interrogation of memory. Risking sentimentality, Wolff confronts a golden age that never was. From the confrontation, he distills a powerful novel of failed expectations and, ultimately, redemptive self-awareness. --Patrick O'Kelley, Amazon.com

"" Gentle, reserved, graceful. . . . Wolff again proves himself to be a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions." -- "Los Angeles Times
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"Ingenious. . . . A tour de force. . . . Achieves a real profundity. "--The Boston Globe
"A sharply drawn, acutely felt novel of moral inquiry. . . . Wolff has put his readers in the landscape tracked across by writers as different as J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and, going back, Conrad and Hawthorne." --The Washington Post Book World
"The kind of deceptively quiet novel that deserves a second, slow reading. An homage to the power of story to move, to awaken and even to transform." --The Plain Dealer

"Gentle, reserved, graceful. . . . Wolff again proves himself to be a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions." --Los Angeles Times