After my last few reviews, I've really wanted to read something that I could write about favorably. I figured Old School would be a sure bet, since I loved Wolff's memoir, This Boy's Life. But alas, I was disappointed yet again. It's not that Old School is a bad novel, it's not just not a particularly good one.
Wolff writes from his own experience about a Jewish boy trying to assimilate into a New England prep school. It's both a coming-of-age tale and the study of a writer's development. Which is lovely, except that there's nothing to set it apart from any other book about any other prep school misfit. There are moments of sparkling clarity, like when Wolff's narrator reflects on how being a writer allows him to "escape the problems of blood and class":
Writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power not conferred by privilege -- the power to create images of the system they stood apart form, and thereby to judge it.
But such instances of insight and masterfully crafted prose are too few and far between to carry and entire novel on their shoulders. Wolff is a good writer, he may even be a great one, but not because of the mediocre Old School.
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