Book Review: OLD SCHOOL by Tobias Wolff

Old School by Tobias Wolff

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


*Spoiler alert for those who have yet to watch the film "The Emperor's Club"...  best skip this review, go watch that beloved Kevin Kline film first, then come back!*

I first heard of this book from a blog post by a friend more than a decade ago (hi Meewa!!!). I thought, "This is MY kind of book!" and I remember going around Metro Manila in various bookstores, looking for it and writing requests with Customer Service that never came to fruition. So imagine my delight when I discovered this for sale at an online secondhand bookstore!!! 

It's so different from the other fiction books on teachers that I've read!! Growing up, I read about these amazing teachers who led amazing, meaningful lives (being weaned on Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Lucy Maud Montgomery)  . They were never wealthy, true, but they were involved in the sacred task of forming souls, and I thought there could be no nobler duty than that!
 
To add to this smorgasbord of Teacher-topia is one of my favorite films of all time ... "The Emperor's Club" with Kevin Kline. The day I was assigned to teach History was one of the happiest of my life, I remember thinking "Oh now I'll be JUST like Mr. Hundert!!"

(It's important to note that... just like Josephine March, Anne Shirley, and Mr. Hundert... all these teachers were of unassailable virtue.)

And here's where I couldn't help but compare OLD SCHOOL to T.E.C (which, incidentally, was based on a piece of fiction as well).

Both are set in elite prep schools, both have main characters who commit that most insidious of violations against the Honor Code: academic dishonesty. Both have teachers who try to live virtuously but fail to live up to moral perfection, being only human. Both show a redemption long time coming, but in very different ways.

OLD SCHOOL shows us what happens when the boy who cheated gets kicked out. But it also shows how that life-changing event allows him to reform himself.

OLD SCHOOL's strength, I thought, was the beauty and power of Wolff's writing. Although he claims that his works are fictional, a quick Google search reveals that he himself went through what the protagonist in this novel did. Redemption in literature. How fitting!

The older me appreciates the moral ambiguity presented in this novel, not just of the student but of the Dean. It shows the damaging power of lies, both of omission and commission, and how we lie even to ourselves because it is so difficult to be true in all things.

English teachers will love the snippets about Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost and Ayn Rand... writers who visit this fictional school to speak to the students... and teachers of all subjects will rejoice in the descriptions of the hustle and bustle of a pre-pandemic school.

Oh how we miss it all!

What IS a school? Wolff writes that it is "the yearning for a chivalric world apart from the din of scandal and cheap dispute, the hustles and schemes of modernity itself." We go online this year, but school has and always will be more than just the building. It's the life of the minds and souls of the teachers and students in it.

And because our seniors didn't experience a physical graduation this year, here's an excerpt about Commencement Exercises: 

"What Purcell would actually lose... was the chance to end this span of years and shared life with the rest of us. To sit with us on the graduation platform and feel silly in his mortarboard cap and mutter dark footnotes during the As-you-go-forth speech... to doctor his punch from a friend's flask, but only once, not wanting to dull himself to the unexpected full-heartedness he feels. To linger as the shadows spill across the grass and day turns to dusk -- even to lend his raspy voice to the songs being raised by boys still not ready to say good-bye to each other. To look into their faces, some dear, some not, all of them familiar as his own, and allow himself a moment's blindness as our last song dies away." :')




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