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Liked It “Beautiful prose; I especially recommend it for lit nerds!” see full review » see other reviews » |
Didn’t Like It “I found it pretty disappointing... Half way through i just didnt care what happened to the characters.” see full review » see other reviews » |
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“This book, at first appealed to me as a former private school student. The two stories, while overlapping, are not really connected or dependent on one another. Wolff’s politics show in his treatment of the famous authors, describing how he believes each of them would behave. He confuses literary character development with political exposition. It’s an interesting little book, but I’m glad it was short.
Leslie wrote this review 2 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
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“Tobias Wolff's Old School is at once a celebration of literature and delicate hymn to a lost innocence of American life and art. Set in a New England prep school in the early 1960s, the novel imagines a final, pastoral moment before the explosion of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the suicide of Ernest Hemingway.
North Shore Country Day School English-10 wrote this review 4 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
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 center 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 realizes, 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.
Old School is a small, neatly made book, spare and clear in its prose. Each chapter is self-contained and free of anything extraneous to the essentials of plot, mood, and character. Near the end of the novel, the narrator, now a respected writer, 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 ”“coming of age, writers, fiction”
Janis F wrote this review 5 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“Beautiful prose; I especially recommend it for lit nerds!”
Jenny M wrote this review 9 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“I found it pretty disappointing... Half way through i just didnt care what happened to the characters.”
Bailey L wrote this review 2 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I was a bit puzzled at the ending - but there was something beautiful about Tobias Wolff's mastery in words - it kept me reading till the end, even though there were some sentences that were a bit too erudite for my simple head. ”
bunnychip9 wrote this review Sunday, November 8 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“** spoiler alert ** It's hard to tell the truth; I think Tobias Wolff does. There are vignettes and phrases that now will flash at certain moments - such as "sodden dinners" - but The line that reverberated with me is on pg. 193 “ Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he’d led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity – its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.” I think the whole story is a set up for this last chapter – and this insight. The roots of our violence are in our desire to be guiltless, perfect, beautiful, flawless, right – pure.
mhmele wrote this review Monday, November 2 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
I love the little hook on our imagination on p. 174 – the false end to the real story – “ He didn’t quite finish. While describing Dean Makepeace’s wedding he broke off and …” It’s only after we finish the book that we think: WHAT wedding??? That is just delightful.
And so I’m left imagining whom he might marry. There being no candidates, it’s 100% up to me to imagine.
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“Drivel. Clearly has no understanding of prep school life and no desire to have done any research about it prior to writing.”
Marina Martin wrote this review Wednesday, October 28 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“If you liked A Separate Peace, you might like this...prep school setting, but with literary figures rather than WW2”
Kathy H wrote this review Thursday, October 15 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“I picked up this book to have something to read for just a minute and ended up finishing it that day. I didn't expect to like it but I found it really interesting. It's a novel about other novels and how they changed the main character. Not the most exciting book and maybe I was in a somber mood, but I found the idea of all these boarding school teenage boys who were really into literature really fascinating. It made me really want to read Hemingway again----go figure.”
Joanna C wrote this review Tuesday, September 15 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
