Replete with verities.(Book Review)

Old School, by Tobias Wolff; Bloomsbury, 2004, $27.95

THERE ARE BOOKS you regret will end, even as you begin them. Tobias Wolff's Old School is one such work. English novelist Sybil Bedford (who also wrote a biography of Aldous Huxley in 1973) might have had Wolff in mind when she said: "As for the writer, there must always be a clash of intentions between literal truth and a more essential truth which is the prerogative of fiction writers." In Old School Wolff returns, as he has in earlier short stories and novels, to mine the raw material of his own life, extract the valuable ore, and forge it into a poignant and memorable story for our own times.

At the beginning of the 1960s a scholarship boy attends a rarefied private school obsessed with literature. Each term a famous writer is invited to speak, and one lucky boy, as a reward for producing the term's best short story, is chosen to have an audience with the writer. This sets the boys into a frenzy of competitiveness carefully concealed behind the private school ethic of nonchalance.

The narrator, who has won an audience with Ernest Hemingway, is expelled from the school before the longed-for meeting takes place because he has plagiarised someone else's work. Years later when he meets the girl whose story he made his own (which in a true sense it was--as his identification with it was absolute and unmasked him to himself) she congratulates him on his prank. She too, had suffered the subtle but insistent snobberies of the "ivy-covered stud farm". This meeting released him and he became, after the usual hardships and iron discipline, a successful writer.

In the novel he distils the self-conscious writing efforts of his classmates in the admonitions of the headmaster to one student: "Purcell, you're not altogether a dull boy, perhaps you can explain what is meant by peyote solidities, or sexless hydrogen ... I am trying to understand these words and I am failing, Purcell, I am failing." Indeed the craft of shaping words into some sort of transcendent reality is examined, almost in passing, with great precision, when Wolff says that the life that produces ...