Temporal Reviews: Old School

Tobias Wolff's first novel, Old School, is of the boys school genre. This novel is about plagarism in advance of artistic goals. The students are all focused on receiving an audience with a famous writer, including Frost, Rand, and Hemingway. The descriptions of these authors is, alone, worth reading the book. What is most delicious is how each author chooses the winning student by completely mis-reading his text.

As a former English major, this is one of the funniest parts of the book. It calls to mind the sad I was caught grossly mis-reading a Dickinson poem in my AmLit class in college. I suggested that "I felt a funeral in my brain" might have been about a headache. To which the teacher responded, "Yes, it does sound like an Excedrin commercial." Oh the humanity! It's nice to see that, at least in Wolff's world, Frost and Rand don't fare much better.