First novel tackles quest for identity

Sunday, January 11, 2004

By Robert Peluso

In today's overheated environment, it's enough for most of us simply to get through a day, let alone devote time to the finer points of existence: What kind of person am I? How did I get to be this way?

	"Old School" By Tobias Wolff Knopf ($22)

These questions aren't exactly priorities in a mach 10 world, where our time is devoured by work and our energy sapped by a steady current of demands. With so much drag on our lives, it seems all too possible, perhaps even necessary, to defer those questions for another day.

But Tobias Wolff has a different view. Using memoir, short story and novella forms, he has shown over the years that those questions lurk at the heart of our existence. In "Old School," Wolff turns for the first time to the novel form, and the result is a beautifully written, if somewhat tendentious, meditation on developing an identity.

"Old School" is set during the 1960-61 academic year at an exclusive preparatory school that takes literature as its mission. The narrator is a respectful if wary senior who keeps a distance from his classmates even as he participates in its literary magazine and awaits the campus visits of famous writers. In a loping story that takes us through the official and unofficial rituals of boarding school, Wolff artfully brings his narrator, a version of himself familiar to readers of "This Boy's Life," to a deeper understanding of his own humanity.

Using a youthful and unnamed narrator in a school setting underscores the central idea of the novel because, as Wolff shows, identity is not a simple state of being but a continual process of becoming. We may have -- or, as Wolff did in "This Boy's Life," even choose -- names for ourselves, but we really live in a much deeper, unnamable place.

"In Old School," Wolff elaborates on the idea in two ways. First, he shows that the creative impulse that drives human character is equal parts deception and truth. Second, he reminds us that whether we are a high school senior or a mature headmaster, the actions we take are what make us who we are. For Wolff, these two facts of existence add up to a single axiom: To think you are immune -- or that any of your decisions and behaviors lie outside the ongoing processes of developing an identity -- is to fall into a kind of pretension, the cardinal sin in Wolff's universe and a condition he examines with acid prose in the section when Ayn Rand visits the school.

Hearing of Rand's appearance, the narrator decides "in a smirky spirit" to familiarize himself with her ideas by reading "The Fountainhead." His smirk disappears quickly, though, as he is swept away by Rand's book. Mightily impressed by his own imagined abilities, he begins to spend his time feeling superior to everyone around him.

"What sheep!" he declares of his classmates at one point. But by the time Rand arrives on campus, the narrator has been unable to even complete a story for submission to her. What is more, he has been humbled by a simple flu. And when, sniffling, he meets the great lady, her scorn for his illness leaves him bitterly disappointed.

This scalding sequence is followed by a contrasting section on Hemingway. In a tone as gentle and considerate as the Rand section is merciless, Wolff arrives at his main point: It is not our bluster that justifies our space on the planet; it is our soft underside.

Appearing in the middle of the novel, the visits of Rand and Hemingway mark not only the turning point of the story but also its thematic core. Here, the narrator finally discovers not so much who he is as what he is, and what we all are -- consummate creators, narrators, whose stories reveal unexpected truths about our humanity even more than the particularities of our identity.

In an otherwise languid book, these important sections seem haunted by a kind of desperation on Wolff's part that pushes them toward the didactic.

These drawbacks aside, the novel rewards us with graceful prose and, best of all, cogent ideas. With Conradian doggedness, Wolff tackles the great project of how to live an authentic life and how to find the courage to do so.

Robert Peluso is a writer and teacher living in Pittsburgh.

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