R's blog

The thing that I found most interesting about this first section of Old School is that though we know our narrator is attending a school, what he learns is never in the classroom, and always comes from personal interactions with other characters or directly from books that he reads. This learning takes many forms, and is sometimes more useful than other times. For example, he appears to learn a good deal about writing stories and poetry from reading the efforts of his classmates, but it is debatable whether what he learns is “good” actually is or not. Myself, I found the “You bitch, said Montague. You perfectly beautiful bitch” line from Bill White’s novel (11) laughably pretentious. The whole concept of these young, sheltered boys writing about a hard-bitten convict “smoking his last cigarette while pouring daringly profane contempt over the judgment of a world that punishes you for one measly murder while ignoring the murder of millions” (7) was to me quite silly. But, of course, it also struck a chord with my own experiences. I wrote my fair share of dreadful, self-absorbed, depressed and depressing poetry as an adolescent.

The other major way in which the narrator learns also hit close to home for me. I saw in his devouring of The Fountainhead the same behavior that I exhibited back when I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for the first time. I was as fascinated by Dagny and Reardon as he was by Dominique and Roark. I, too, was seduced by the elitist, hyper-capitalist propaganda embedded in Rand’s work. And, to my embarrassment, the flirtation that the narrator has with Rain over a provocative passage in the book is a perfect stand-in for my own high-school experience of finding out that a young man I was attracted to was reading Atlas Shrugged.

So other than being a series of moderately interesting anecdotes relating my personal life to the text, what is the point of this? The point is that I can’t help but wonder how true this stuff is for other members of our class. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has written regrettable metaphors as a younger writer, or whose reach exceeded her grasp in writing short stories… Can the events of learning in the novel be said to be universal? How many of us have had an experience of being seduced and ultimately disillusioned by a text, like the narrator’s, if not directly that of being so affected by Ayn Rand’s work? It seems to me that though Tobias Wolff has written about a very specific institution of education, that of a private boarding school in New England at a certain point in history, the education that he has written about is far more general. It may be, in fact, the education that all young readers and writers receive, no matter what institution they are schooled in.