Old School by Tobias Wolff ( Bloomsbury, 2005)

Tobias Wolff, a celebrated novelist and short story writer, has crafted a wonderful short novel which is both part-memoir and part literary criticism. It is set in an East Coast American boys boarding school, known as a prep school, in the early 1960s and is something of a coming-of-age, rites of passage story. But it is also much more than that – Wolff deals with big themes such as class, trust, loyalty, honour and the nature of friendship as well as the writer’s art, and artifice.

The plot is concerned with a story-writing competition amongst sixth form boys at the unnamed prestigious school, which could be one of a dozen such establishments, from Groton to Andover, that has educated the mainly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) offspring of networked established families of the East Coast elite from the mid-19th century until the present day.

The focus on literature is an important part of the school’s educational agenda. It provides the driving narrative of the story, which is in the first person. The visiting writer chooses the winner of the competition among the senior boys, the prize being a private audience with the visitor and publication in the school magazine.

The rivalry amongst the book-obsessed aspiring writers that make up the sixth form student body is intense. One of the themes taken up by Wolff is that of identity: the narrator has a fear that his Jewish origins will be discovered, which he has kept a secret.

The climax of the novel brilliantly brings these overt and hidden themes together. The narrator wins the competition but is expelled for copying another’s work and passing it off as his own. He discovers a story written some years before by a pupil from a nearby girls’ school and so closely identifies the events of the story with his own life that he believes it to be something he could and should have written himself. It deals with Jewish identity kept secret; privilege and class and self-concealment. It itself encompasses the strands of the wider novel. A story within a story expertly accomplished. The deed is discovered and punished by banishment for breaking the honour code.

This event is what forms the author as a writer, but the story does not end with disgrace and humiliation. Many years later his former master tells him a postscript to the saga which provides an insightful twist: the senior teacher known as the Dean resigned from his post the day of the expulsion. So who is the writer whose work is to prove both the undoing and salvation of more than one character in the novel? It is Ernest Hemingway.