If you still own your Norton Anthologies … (this book is for you)

It’s 3am. Do you know where your Norton Anthologies are?

And that, dear friends, proves that I’m an English-major nerd. It’s true that I still have mine, the phone-book sized volumes with Bible-thin pages, filled with English or American Literature, lugged around by English students causing four years of backaches and just as many headaches.

We loved them, we hated them. We read them.

And if you did, here’s another book to read. Old School by Tobias Wolff. 

My mother-in-law slipped me her copy and I justified breaking my fiction-only-on-vacation rule by reasoning that this book was borderline great American literature.

And it is.  So good. Why? I can’t even tell you. That’s how good it is. I’m not even smart enough to condense it. But I’ll try:

The setting is an elite prep school in 1960, and the narrator is a half-Jewish scholarship-student (a lower-class outsider) who learns to mimic the mannerisms of his privileged classmates in order to fit in and gain acceptance. More than anything he wants to be a writer, but he cannot write the truth until he first learns to tell the truth about himself.

The author, Tobias Wolff, is a master. The protagonist he’s created is ingeniously flawed; in fact, we may as well be reading our own thoughts when we read his. The themes of competition, pride, and pretense  cut to the heart of our image-obsession and veneered society. Wolff also does a knock-out job of critiquing Ayn Rand’s novels. Again, something I’m not smart enough to do but appreciate him doing!

The best part? Nothing works out perfectly, and yes this is perfect too, because the final picture Wollf paints is one of grace. He ends with these words:

“Surely the most beautiful words ever written or said: His faither, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him.”

So, if you’re looking for a bit of fiction and you recognize the names Hemmingway and Frost, this book is for you. And if you hate it, no sweat — you’re always welcome to borrow my Norton Anthology.

{Thanks for allowing me a little English-nerd fun … bless your day!}