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October 29, 2004 [feather]
Highly recommended:

Tobias Wolff's first novel, Old School. Here's the first paragraph:


Robert Frost made his visit in November of 1960, just a week after the general election. It tells you something about our school that the prospect of his arrival cooked up more interest than the contest between Nixon and Kennedy, which for most of us was no contest at all. Nixon was a straight arrow and a scold. If he'd been one of us we would have glued his shoes to the floor. Kennedy, though--here was a warrior, an ironist, terse and unhysterical. He had his clothes under control. His wife was a fox. And he read and wrote books, one of which, Why England Slept, was required reading in my honors history seminar. We recognized Kennedy; we could still see in him the boy who would have been a favorite here, roguish and literate, with that almost formal insouciance that both enacted and discounted the fact of his class.

Old School is a gem of a little novel, a deceptively simple story of nostalgic regret for past mistakes that contains within it a complicated meditation on the nature of honesty, creativity, and community. There's also a devastatingly biting extended portrait of Ayn Rand, so sniping and spiteful that the narrative nearly sacrifices itself for the sake of a nasty knife twist. But it doesn't, and instead, the Rand interlude just becomes a structural analogue of the story's ongoing investigation of how personal integrity and truth-telling are not only not always the same thing, but are at times wildly, impossibly opposed.

Read it.
posted on October 29, 2004 11:10 AM








Comments:

I realize this post is a few weeks old, but I just read the book.

Don't you find it ironic that Wolff's book is essentially a retelling of Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent?
Posted by: Leopold Stotch at December 3, 2004 11:42 PM