Today, courtesy of Pclem, I read Tobias Wolff's Old School, the sort-of sequel to This Boy's Life, Wolff's memoir of his early years. Both books are great.

Unlike This Boy's Life, Old School purports to be a novel. It wasn't quite what I was expecting; Old School doesn't bring up many of the threads from This Boy's Life, and isn't quite as personal as the first book was. Its unnamed, first-person hero--who bears more than a passing similarity to Tobias Wolff himself--is a budding writer in his last year of private high school. The true heart of the book, however, is found in the three well-known writers who visit the prep school and interact with its students.

As a budding writer myself, needless to say I found it fascinating.

This isn't Dead Poets Society. It's not about the students as much as it's about words. But for a novel that's so preoccupied with the related questions of "What is a writer?" and "How do I become one?", it doesn't lack heart. When the narrator makes a very bad choice at the start of the last third of the book, the sudden return to reality, to story, is deeply moving.

If I had any complaint, it'd be that the last thirty or so pages of the book are somewhat anticlimatic after that trainwreck. (You'll know what I'm talking about when you read it.)

I love Tobias Wolff. I'm kind of surprised how much I do, because he's much closer to "conventional" that any of the other writers that I regularly read. (His Gerriest story is probably "Bullet in the Brain" from The Night in Question, which Michael Parker brought in during my very first MFA workshop as a better version of the story I'd tried to write, and which is still one of my favorites nonetheless). I eat up everything of Wolff's that I pick up. And that part of me that still wants to write like Hemingway really wants to write like Tobais Wolff.

That guy's all right.