R's blog

I haven’t read anyone else’s blog yet, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who was confused by the second half of Old School. I can’t seem to think of anything else to write about, so perhaps it may be useful for me to examine the things that bothered me. First was that the narrative in the first half (and for a short period thereafter) seemed to follow a roughly straight line, moving forward, with few flashbacks or digressions, in a fairly orderly progression of time. The narrator didn’t exactly show us things happening day by day, but large chunks of time were not skipped – everything took place one thing after another over the course of a school year, more or less. In the second half of the book, this is no longer true. It feels like the narrator is skipping stones across the pond of his life, where before he was wading at a smooth pace through the water. We stop briefly in his time as an enlisted member of the army, then skip on until he meets with Susan Friedman, then skip on again until the narrator is invited to speak at his old school. To me, it felt very disjointed, especially when the book closes with the story of Dean Makepeace’s accidental lie about Hemingway. I was left wondering “What happened to the –narrator-?” When I started reading this book, I had certain expectations about how it would end. I thought, as I read the first few chapters, “this book is about the narrator’s last year at this school. It will end when he graduates, or shortly before or after.” When that eventuality was precluded by him being kicked out of school, I revised my prediction. I thought “now the narrator must come to terms with his mistake, and make peace with it somehow. The story will end when he either learns to do that, or overcomes it somehow, possibly with good personal and professional success.” No doubt, his becoming a well-known enough literary figure to be invited back to his own school would have been a reasonably suitable ending for that purpose. But instead, we end with someone else’s story entirely. I don’t know what to make of it, and it’s been bugging me for over a week.

What the novel actually definitively ends with gives me less trouble. The last line ends with “His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him”, which seems to be very appropriate. In the part of the narrative where it actually appears, it describes Arch’s feeling of homecoming. I think it also describes in a way how the adults of that particular world of academia are in a way like children themselves their whole professional lives, even as they teach actual children. They are sheltered by the insular world of the private school, and Arch’s story certainly seems to show that they do not do well away from it. That sentiment, speaking about a father, authority figures, seeming to speak of affection and comfort and protection, also seems to describe what the narrator wants at the beginning of the book, and possibly at the end as well. He wants someone to come running to meet him, to acknowledge him and support him in that safe way that fathers do.

I sense that there is more meaning to be unpacked from this line, and wish I knew what it was from, exactly. It definitely seems to have a biblical theme or connection, but since it was offered almost as a quote, I thought it might be from somethign else, as well. As an interesting aside, I ran a quick internet search to see if I could turn it up, and got an interesting article, linked at http://www.gallerybooks.com/bkm/wob031102.html