Literary Life

This acute, graceful novel begins as a dreamlike memory of a vanished world. Its setting is a New England prep school in 1960, a ceremonious, high-minded and improbably literary place where the boys compete as writers rather than as athletes and the ultimate prize is a private audience with a visiting author like Robert Frost, Ayn Rand or Ernest Hemingway (whose public personas are here deliciously sent up). All of which seems too good to be true.

Sure enough, Old School (Knopf; 195 pages) soon begins revealing the painful realities beneath its chivalric trappings. The nameless narrator, an outsider desperate to attain the "careless gentility" of his well-born schoolmates, makes a terrible mistake and is expelled. The "sure and finished" teachers prove to be mortals with broken marriages and sham credentials. Recent graduates fizzle out or die young.

This isn't mere debunking. Tobias Wolff, the admired author of the memoirs This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army, plus several books of short stories, makes his grownup narrator a writer very like himself and brings him to a complex, loving reconciliation with his old school despite its flaws. Writing, Wolff suggests, can teach you not only a measure of self-knowledge but also the ability to open yourself to an imperfect world. "The life that produces writing can't be written about," the narrator maintains. But in Old School Wolff gives it a very good shot.