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    Old School
    Old School
    Old School
    Audiobook6 hours

    Old School

    Written by Tobias Wolff

    Narrated by Dan Cashman

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    The author of the genre-defining memoir This Boy’s Life, the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning novella The Barracks Thief, and short stories acclaimed as modern classics, Tobias Wolff now gives us his first novel.
    Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself. His final year, however, unravels everything he’s achieved, and steers his destiny in directions no one could have predicted.
    The school’s mystique is rooted in Literature, and for many boys this becomes an obsession, editing the review and competing for the attention of visiting writers whose fame helps to perpetuate the tradition. Robert Frost, soon to appear at JFK’s inauguration, is far less controversial than the next visitor, Ayn Rand. But the final guest is one whose blessing a young writer would do almost anything to gain.

    No one writes more astutely than Wolff about the process by which character is formed, and here he illuminates the irresistible power, even the violence, of the self-creative urge. Resonant in ways at once contemporary and timeless, Old School is a masterful achievement by one of the finest writers of our time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
    Release dateJan 29, 2019
    ISBN9781984887979
    Author

    Tobias Wolff

    Tobias Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up in Washington State. He attended Oxford University and Stanford University, where he now teaches English and creative writing. He has received the Story Prize, both the Rea Award and PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

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    Reviews for Old School

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      Old School is about a kid at a New England boarding school where they have writing contests. Each year, the winner gets to meet a visiting author.

      This was an enjoyable book for me since I have an interest in writing--one of the main themes being that writers must not be afraid to expose their true selves in their art. I liked Wolff's weaving of real authors into the story, and especially loved the smackdown he gives to Ayn Rand.

      I didn't like the way he presented dialogue without quotations--at first I didn't notice it, but at one point it really confused me as to whether a character was talking or it was just part of the narrative. I can see that maybe that was his point, because it does create an atmosphere of being in the story since the quotations are not distractingly set apart, but it also added confusion. The ending worked, but it was a little meandering too. I felt like I didn't really need to know what happened in the next forty years, and that the parallels between the narrator's experience and that of Dean Makepeace could have been handled in a different way (not that I can suggest one).
    • 4/5
      The narrator has learned to mimic the demeanor and manners of his adoptive tribe while hiding as much of himself as possible in an effort to blend in at his prep school in New England. But in his last year, everything he is worked for falls apart, and his destiny takes him in unexpected places.
      The literary culture of the school is deeply ingrained, and for many boys, this leads to an obsession.
    • 3/5
      Well written and absorbing novel of being in a prep school surrounded by wannabe writers. Helps to know something about Ayn Rand, Frost, and Hemingway. It is short but has a lot of impact. About truth and pretending.
    • 4/5
      This book is worth it just to read the fictional portrayals of Frost, Ayn Rand, and Hemingway. It has a bit of an old trope--the narrator, a student at a prestigious East Coast boarding school, is really (gasp) a bit of an outsider...he's poor AND Jewish!--but it captures something about American sensibilities of class, money, intellectual dishonesty and the desire for something better. And as an English teacher I have to love any story that elevates the love of literature to a cult-like status.
    • 4/5
      I am no longer a Tobias Wolff virgin. I thoroughly enjoy my first Wolff book until the 2nd to last chapter. The book was engrossing with his literature references, writer cameos and especially the protagonist's story of his final year at an all boys private school.
      Emotions galore about in this book. You laugh at his descriptions of this peers, cry when you realize he must leave the school even before he knows he is leaving. Hasn't everyone thought of adding their name to something so wonderful that it feels s if it is yours?

      As you read Old School you feel the characters jumping out of the book and into your own life. Who has never had a Big Jeff in their school or a Bill White? I know I did. Which is what makes this book so good, and yet disappointing at the same time. That 2nd to last chapter of the protagonist's story seemed rushed and completely different than the rest of the book as if Wolff just didn't know how to tie it all up. Such a let down.

      The final Chapter - Master was the story of the Dean and I wished that it had been somehow woven into the meeting with Mr. Ramsey so as not to have it thrown in as if it was an after thought.

      I would have loved to give this book a rating of 5 stars except for those last 2 chapters. The storyline in those last chapters were great, but seemed even to be writing as if by someone else instead of Wolff and maybe that is because it is in the protagonist's older voice. It just didn't sit well with me... Sadly, as I adore the rest of the book.
    • 4/5
      This is more than a coming-of-age story. It requires the reader to look at truth in a new way.
    • 3/5
      If you've been to boarding school, you'll enjoy this. The cliques, the shifting alliances. And the wresting with doing the right thing.
    • 4/5
      It felt like self-indulgence on Wolff’s part, though not really in a negative way. He’s a careful enough writer to pull it off. But I got a strong whiff of a very reverential nostalgia for his younger self in the process of becoming both a writer and a moral man. It’s a fond book, and although I’m not sure I liked how he handled the last section, it was still good and easygoing. His tenderness for the characters was especially sweet—I can’t remember the last time I read a book without a single dislikable person in it.
    • 2/5
      Predictable.
    • 4/5
      A beautiful short novel set in an American prep school where the biggest event of the academic year, at least for the unnamed first-person narrator and many of his friends, is not a sporting event; not a mixer with the girls' school down the road, but a writing competition. A competition that gives the winner a one-on-one meeting with whichever visiting writer of renown the school has successfully invited to talk to the students this year. Frost, Ayn Rand, Hemingway---the boys' minds boggle at being judged worthy of standing in such light. Our narrator dreams of being a writer. "I knew that Maupassant...had been taken up when young by Flaubert and Turgenev; Faulkner by Sherwood Anderson; Hemingway by Fitzgerald and Pound and Gertrude Stein. All these writers were welcomed by other writers. It seemed to follow that you needed such a welcome...My aspirations were mystical. I wanted to receive the laying on of hands...I wanted to be anointed." For three years, Toby (I'm going to call him Toby, because let's face it: this has to be heavily autobiographical stuff. It reads much more like memoir than fiction.) strives to be the chosen one. The process becomes the core of his education--not just in literature, or in creativity, but in life, as he confronts again and again the difficulty of knowing the purpose of Truth when Honor may seem to be better served by deception.
    • 4/5
      The setting is a New England prep school in the 1960’s, where literature and authors are held in the highest esteem. I thought this part of the plot alone would make the book worth reading. The unnamed narrator is a young student at the prep school. The school manages to garner famous writers to come for visits and talk to the boys. First Robert Frost, then Ayn Rand, and finally the master - Hemmingway. Before the authors arrive, the school holds a writing contest, judged by the visiting author; the student whose story (or poem) is picked wins a personal visit with the author, and the envy of every other student.

      The storyline follows this young boy through each of his attempts at winning a face-to-face with each author. Along the way he realizes that truly good writing required revealing more of himself to the people around him. I won’t spoil the ending, but to me the path he choose after this realization is both ironic and confusing. And the fact that the last few pages of the book don’t really deal with this student, but a short life story of one of his teachers, made me feel let down. The ending just didn’t make sense to me.

      The most interesting part of the book was the visit from Ayn Rand, and made me want to learn more about her. I want to find out if she was as obnoxious and conceited in real life as she was portrayed in this novel.
    • 4/5
      I found this book interesting. I would have liked to have learned more about the main character between the time he was writing the book and the time he left school; I felt that was glossed over and could have really enhanced the story. Mainly I liked this book because it talked about so many other literary works!
    • 4/5
      A vivid semi-autobiographical novel about a writer-to-be at an exclusive and competitive New England prep school where literature is everything, and student writers compete for the right to personal audiences with visiting celebrities including Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway. Questions of race and class bubble more or less gently under everything before the theme of the book resolves into the question of honesty, honor, and the way a writer's path inevitably creates tension with both. Understated, nuanced, and thought-provoking.
    • 4/5
      Old School is about a prep school boy trying to win a literary contest so he can meet Robert Frost, Ayn Rand or Ernest Hemingway. The three authors are characters in the book as they visit the school. I found the portrayal of Ayn Rand to be a little unfair, as did many of her followers on Ayn Rand websites.

      One of the themes of the book that spoke to me was literature as a shared experience. Early on, the author explains why he and his classmates have such high esteem for English teachers in particular:

      Say you’ve just read Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.” Like the son in the story, you’ve sensed the faults in your father’s character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable; left alone, you’d probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son.

      Much later, that brooding man with the limp is described:

      He’d been a reader since childhood, and the habit had deepened during his years of travel for the Forbes-Farragut shipping line, but until he began teaching he’d rarely had occasion to talk about what he read. He could read a story like “The Minister’s Black Veil” and both shrink from and relish the soul-chill it worked on him without having to fix that response in words, or explain how Hawthorne had produced it. Teaching made him accountable for his thoughts, as as he became accountable for them he had more of them, and they became sharper and deeper.

      After he leaves the school, the experience of reading is changed for the teacher:

      For thirty years he had lived in conversation with boys, answerable to their own sense of how things worked, to their skepticism, and, most gravely, to their trust. Even when alone he had read and thought in their imagined presence, made responsible by it, enlivened and honed by it. Now he read in solitude and hardly felt himself to be alive.
    • 4/5
      I loved the cover of the book and felt it so accurately portrayed the atmosphere of the school. Heads bowed in unison but somehow also letting the reader know that each of these young men are individuals with their own stories. The is definitely a book for the lover of literature; otherwise, I don't see how anyone could understand the anguish these young men put themselves through attempting to gain the attention of a famous author. I loved the inclusion of real authors such as Frost and Rand. I loved the sudden and often unexpected small flashes of humor. I loved the ending which took the story into what seemed to be an entirely new direction but took the plot full circle.

      I have never particularly liked or understood the parable of the prodigal son, but this book has cast an entirely new light on that story. The final sentence in the book is so powerful. And I can't think of any other novel that so well examines the consequences of acquiescing to a lie.

      This isn't a book for everyone, but if you love literature and understand its grip, this is a book to explore.
    • 5/5
      Wow! Wish I could write like this!
    • 4/5
      For the first 10 pages or so I was underwhelmed. Yet another semi-autobiographical novel about a young boy's coming of age at an exclusive prep school? Featuring yet another young male protagonist who aspires to become a writer? In this outing, the plot of the story revolves around a yearly literary competition in which the winner gets to meet a major author - Hemingway, Frost, Rand. But all the obligatory subplots are there: the privileged schoolmates who see the world as their oyster, scholarship students seeking to conceal their bourgeois origins, competition, cruelty, sports/games, noisy dining halls, inscrutable dons, faculty politics.

      Except that that's not really what this novel is about.

      Underneath the familiar trappings, this is a moving and authentic evocation of that time in everyone's life when we must figure out who and what we will become. A time during which, by the way, literature assumes an awesome power to mold and shape us. What young girl of the 1900s didn't want to grow up to be independent and strong-minded like Jo in Little Women? What young boy of the 1950s didn't pick up their ideas on duty and honor from Hardy Boys books? What young person of the 1960s didn't experience the world through the eyes of Hunter S. Thompson? During the course of this novel, our protagonist finds his worldview shaped by each of the literary figures noted above, on a journey that ultimately culminates in finding his authentic voice. His path – like ours - is peppered with misjudgments and missteps, some minor, others appalling; but in the end those mistakes prove as important as successes in shaping our protagonist into the man he is to become.

      Wolff’s prose is gorgeous and his word portraits of the academy so evocative, I could practically smell the brick dust and leaf mold as the boys walked between classes.

      Not the best choice if you’re looking for light reading, perhaps, but a dense, thoughtful book designed to inspire reflection and an appreciation for the role that literature, values, and experiences assume in shaping our lives and characters.
    • 3/5
      Is it me, or does it get tedious when authors write about young people (usually college or just out of college or sometimes trying to get into college) who want to be authors? It is as if there is a code of conduct that requires them to be semi-autobiographical before they are allowed to do anything else. (And then, quite often, they never do anything else. In which case they are not authors, but just note takers. But I digress.)

      So we hold before us another tale of a prep school student (unnamed) who considers himself an author – or at least a wannabe. The arc of the story surrounds the literary contest whereby the winner gets to spend time alone with the literary illuminati who come to visit the school. In this particular year, those stars are Frost, Rand, and Hemingway. As the narrator struggles to win each contest, he makes what passes for personal progress in this book. There are the obligatory moments of teenage angst, there are internal philosophical dialogues, and there are the revelations – revelations that may be earthshattering to the world of prep schools, but are just so-so to the rest of us. And maybe that is one of the things the author is trying to say – it is the broader world that is important.

      And it is exactly such an interpretation that makes me wonder; maybe there are layers deeper than I am giving the author credit for. There is no doubt that the progression of famous authors who come to speak at the school drive the narrator's discovery of himself. And it is also obvious that he cannot find his own direction until he gets out of the school environment. And it also becomes apparent that his attempts to hide who he is are what keeps him from being the author he wants to be.

      But is that really all that deep? Is there something more I am missing? I don't really think so.

      All the above makes it sound as if this is a horrible novel; it is not. I semi-enjoyed reading it and, as evidenced by some of the questions raised, it made me think. But did I enjoy it enough or did it make me think enough to make it a screaming recommendation? Not so much.
    • 4/5
      Wolff explores all of the realms with which we are familiar when thinking of a private school in New England during the late 50s. This book touches on what it meant to be Jewish in an upper class setting and how one was required to essentially hide both cultural heritage and change one's own identity to fit in with peers, but the book also focuses on class struggles, growing up, and finding one's way in life. I must admit that Wolff's entirely accurate portrayal of the crazed Ayn Rand had me laughing heartily and was my favourite part of the book. This novel is almost impossible to put down and therefore, any possible and future readers should be sure to allow themselves enough time to read the entire story in one sitting. The ending, although somewhat unpopular with some, is almost essential in rounding off the lives of these characters. Old School is, at its core, a story about what it means to be human and therefore, stepping away from the initial narrator's viewpoint serves to create a plot-driven circle of understanding regarding the foibles every man shares.
    • 4/5
      I read this novel in two sittings with rapt attention, I will reflect more deeply on it later. For now, I can say that Wolff has crafted a subdued and wondrous question about class, ethnicity, and most of all authenticity. This is a meditation on identity set in a school that feels like a literary fever dream. You can feel the weight and scent of these old halls where these great writers come to visit. Their voices are captured perfectly. Frost is wise and comical, though if that's how Frost was I'm not sure being that I am not very familair with the man and his work. Hemingway is assured and strong in the way we all know, or is he? Ayn Rand, though, graces the pages of this book to be nothing less than a riotous tour de force of troubling strangeness. She makes us slap our hands hard on our desks and guffaw almost impulsively. If we were able to meet her odd character we'd laugh some more, out of sheer disbelief. If we could only meet Frost or Hemingway, though, then then we could be a writer. Because they would give us some secret shard of wisdom, but all the more because we met them, and it was known that we met them, and we wrote. What we could be then, oh yes ...
    • 5/5
      Wolff writes with an economy of words, so this is a short novel. It is told from the first person of a student in an exclusive boarding school, but the real subject is writing and the issues of honesty and self-knowledge. I read this as a monthly book discussion assignment and found it to be worthy of slow, careful reading as the density of ideas is significant. It is an easy read that is rewarded by thoughtful reflection. 4.5 stars.
    • 4/5
      This novel was enjoyable from start to finish. Wolff's writing is delectably detailed, bringing the characters and setting majestically to life. The book is especially enjoyable for anyone who writes. However, we lose the narrator in the final chapter, rendering the novel as a whole inconclusive.
    • 4/5
      This book reads so much like a memoir, that I was surprised to find it wasn’t. The story follows a young man in his senior year, at a private boarding school, somewhere in New England. It is 1960. He is part of the “scribblers”, a group that reveres writing, “book drunk boys”.
      Several renowned authors visit the school and in preparation to Ayn Rands visit, the narrator reads The Fountainhead and becomes infatuated with her radical ideas. This changes quickly, as she makes her appearance, along with her thuggish entourage and her Fascist presentation. It’s both funny and scary.
      The story takes a dramatic turn, when Hemingway is scheduled to appear and a contest is put in motion, for a short story contest to be submitted by the students and judged by Hem himself. Here our narrator makes a crucial error, a mistake that could have serious repercussions, in both his academic and adult life.
      I loved Wolff’s memoir This Boy’s Life and look forward to reading his short story collections. This is his first novel and it was a pleasure to read.
    • 1/5
      I listened to this book on CD during a road trip with my parents, and although I slept through a few parts, what I heard I strongly disliked. Although it's a coming of age story, I can only bear to watch a main character make so many mistakes in one novel.
    • 4/5
      If I were asked to describe this novel in a few words I guess I would say “Quiet, gentle read. Compelling coming of age story. A book about books and writers. “The unnamed narrator (and you could swear this was a memoir but, no, it’s a novel) is in his senior year at a private boarding school on the east coast in 1960. It’s an elite school and he’s a scholarship boy trying desperately to fit in with this upper crust population. It’s also a school that places great importance on writing and writers and three times a year an important writer comes to visit. Based on a submitted piece of writing, one student is selected to actually have a private meeting with the writer. When I say “important” I mean Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, Ayn Rand, that sort of important. Very important.

      Our narrator is in love with books and writing, as are his acquaintances. This is his crowd and they are competing against each other to win the golden prize—the private audience—much like other boys compete on the football field. Along the way, we learn about his loneliness and his desperate wish to be what he is not and the love that was there all along. In trying to write his paper in preparation for a visit from what he considers to be the foremost American author (you figure it out) Wolff, who is new to me, sums up our narrator’s plight beautifully:

      “The whole thing came straight from the truthful diary I’d never kept: the typing class, the bus, the apartment; all mine. All mine too the calculations and stratagems, the throwing-over of old friends for new, the shameless manipulation of a needy, loving parent and the desperation to flee not only the need but the love itself. Then the sweetness of flight, the lightness and joy of escape. And, yes, the almost physical attraction to privilege, the resolve to be near it at any cost: sycophancy, lies, self-suppression, the masking of ambitions and desires, the slow cowardly burn of resentment toward those whose favor you have falsified yourself.” (Page125)

      Our poor narrator though makes one critical mistake in his exuberance to produce the perfect story for a revered author. Beautifully written and highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      As indicated by all reviewers, you know the plot, which involves the final year of a senior’s endeavors at his private, boys’ school as seen by an unnamed narrator in retrospect.

      More than the plot, the author’s mastery is alive in the first paragraph on the first page.

      Reading a book is more than deconstructing a plot puzzle. There is usually a plot puzzle to be solved. But this is not a plot-based book. This is a milieu, and the events of the narrator are less important than capturing a slice of life involving this school year—in this regard, don’t expect a climax or to watch the main character change for the better—or worse.

      Essentially, you have 200 pages of life during the narrator’s senior year. The boys are literarily inclined, more interested in appearing literary than becoming literary, as the parents’ money and family’s name will carry most of the young men wherever they end up. Except for the narrator, who hints at his split heritage of ambivalence between Judaism, Christianity, and Hemingway-ism.

      As all the boys are more interested in literature over politics, as Wolff informs us in the first paragraph of the book, we come to see that life’s lessons are less significant than eking ones way into social status. For example, the narrator confronts the biggest mistake of his youth, not because he feels sorry, but because he misunderstands its place in his life. He carries guilt for years and when he finally seeks confession to the person he’s harmed, she is unsympathetic to his plight, his problem, or his wrong. He may have set his world straight, but it doesn’t affect her life, and it certainly doesn’t affect a hill of beans.

      This isn’t the end of the story.

      In a milieu, the story is not concerned with the dramatic turn, and another, the dean of he school, carries the same sense of burdensome guilt. In his final confession, years after the fact, no one remembers the incident and those who have a recollection, don’t care. The boys, now successful men, of course, are interested only in fund raising for their alma mater. Case closed, book over.

      This takes nothing away from Wolff as master storyteller, and he is. What a please to walk with a confident author for 200 pages.

      4 stars out of 5.
    • 4/5
      A man's look back at his teen years in the 1970s spent at boys prep school in New England, his aspirations to become a great American writer, his embarrassment at being a scholarship student, and his unwillingness to admit to classmates that he is Jewish.
      Very witty dialogue and prose, very well-developed narrator.
      "...at that point I knew what I knew: That what happened to everyone else would happen to me."
      (--) not recommended for teen reading -- full enjoyment of the book depends on grasp of complex authors and poets, appreciation of rhetorical devices, and careful reading
      (--) it's a middle-aged man looking back on his coming-of-age, his realization that Ayn Rand did not get it right, that there is more to life than the one's own needs and wants -- will teen readers get it or care?
    • 5/5
      I devoured this book, reading it mostly over the period of two days and becoming completely engrossed in it. It's the story of a boy who is a senior at an all-boys' prep school in the 1960's. He is enamored by the written word: he loves to read and he wants to be a writer. Many of the other boys at his school are the same way, and many, including the narrator, are pretty competitive and driven to outshine the other boys in the literary arena.

      Objectively speaking, there's a lot about the book to critique-- a lot that some people wouldn't like, and that I didn't necessarily like. Take, for instance, the fact that we never learn the narrator's name, not to mention the name of his school, or the exact setting of his school. Or take the fact that on its surface the plot could seem rather boring, and it lacks a conflict until towards the end. Basically the boy writes stories for a school contest in which the winner gets to meet one of the visiting authors who come to the school: first Robert Frost, then Ayn Rand, and then Ernest Hemingway. The story is told like a memoir, or almost like a diary, which gives the reader a very limited view of the world at large and instead focuses on the boy's inner thoughts and limited experiences. At some points I guess this could get frustrating because I wanted to know more details about certain things and less details about certain things. And I suppose the narrator isn't all that likeable, because he can seem petty, insecure, and perhaps even snotty over things that many people would think insignificant or banal: who can write the best essay, or who can memorize a passage by Faulkner, etc.

      What made me love this book despite all of the above would-be flaws was that I could completely identify with the narrator's immersion in literature. I loved how he loved words, he loved thinking about books and authors, how he loved dreaming about being a writer. I could completely relate. At one point he gets all caught up in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which I also did in high school, and he spends all the time he is supposed to be writing his story instead reading or thinking about the book. Another thing that I liked is that I felt that much of the book must have been autobiographical, and I know that Wolff is known for his memoirs. I don't know whether it is or not, although I know that Wolff went to a prep school called the Hills and that the front cover photograph is of his class at dinner. But I kept wondering how much of the book was kind of a trick that Wolff was playing on the readers, because at certain points the narrator would start wondering about how much of an author's work is reflective of the author's life, and vice versa. I loved Wolff's portrayals of the different famous authors and I wondered what he used (except for legend, and maybe that was all) to write so convincingly in fiction about these larger-than-life characters.

      For me the only issue I had with the book was that I really didn't like the last chapter, and I was left wondering what the book's overarching theme was supposed to be, if any. At first I thought the book was about how many writers or would-be writers are really only dreamers, and it inspired me to actually take action and write and work hard at it instead of just thinking about how much I'd love to be an author like all the famous authors. Obviously not many published writers are famous and it seems to me that the allure to be well-known as an author can sometimes outshine the down and dirty aspect of just sitting down and writing, with the realization that maybe few people if any will actually read your work. Kind of like the guts is more important than the glory thing. But by the end I thought maybe the book was supposed to be about redemption, or about how all humans are fallible and make mistakes and have secrets, and to me there was a disconnect between that theme and the earlier theme. I obviously liked the earlier theme and therefore thought the later theme or explanation unnecessary.

      Anyway, I can't put into words why I loved this book so much. I think it is simply that it captures the experience of being a reader and a wannabe writer. In my opinion people who love literature will love this book and people who like more of an entertaining story or likeable character could probably hate this book. I personally loved it and wish it was longer because it seemed to be over way too fast. I give this book 4.5 stars and classify it as one of my favorites!

      For more book reviews and other posts of interest to readers and writers, please visit my blog, Voracia: Goddess of Words.
    • 4/5
      A very short novel set mostly at a boys' boarding school in New England in 1960-61. Famous writers visit the school, and the students submit pieces of their writing for the honor of having a face to face audience with the writer. The novel concerns deception (both self- and to others), issues of class, and storytelling. There are two different sections - I wish they had been a bit more balanced, but otherwise very good, quiet story.
    • 4/5
      Here is a book about people who love books written for people who love books. The plot is straightforward enough: At an East Coast prep school where writing contests generate more excitement than athletic ones, the narrator is forced to confront himself in a most unexpected way and the result changes the course of his life.

      The idea that fiction is a force that can both redeem and trap a person is one of the book’s compelling themes and a premise that would seem to be more than a little tricky to pull off well. However, in Wolff’s spare and direct language, this notion is given a fresh life and the result is very rewarding. By the way, after reading this novel it may be impossible for you to admit to liking both Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway; the author certainly makes it clear which writer he’d choose.