Old School – Tobias Wolff
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008Back in the ‘90s, I read Tobias Wolff’s memoirs of growing up in a struggling, single-parent family – This Boy’s Life (1989) – and of serving as a junior officer in the U.S. airborne division in Vietnam – In Pharoah’s Army: Memories of a Lost War (1994). I was impressed by both books, for the honesty and vulnerability of Wolff’s confessions, and for the grace of his prose style.
Recently someone presented me with a copy of Old School (2004) for my birthday. According to Tobias Wolff, it’s a novel, but it could fit quite easily into the gap between his two earlier memoirs. At the end of This Boy’s Life, the narrator wins a scholarship to a prep school, somewhat against the odds. Old School, set in 1961, tells the story of a final-year scholarship boy at just such an illustrious prep school, prior to his military service in Vietnam.
In the main, Old School is about the [...]
