Between truth and fiction: Tobias Wolff's 'Old School'

At the end of his classic 1989 memoir, "This Boy's Life," Tobias Wolff escapes small-town Washington (a little somewhere named Concrete) by getting a scholarship to Hill School, a boy's prep school in Pennsylvania. There, he tells us, he didn't do well. Trailing far behind his fellow students academically, he became one of the school's "wildmen — a drinker, a smoker, a make-out artist at the mixers we had with Baldwin and Shipley and Miss Fine's. But that's another story."

We've had to wait 14 years for it, but here's that story at last.

"Old School" is being billed as Wolff's first novel, rather than a memoir. But in period, place and emotional feel, it's clearly the link between "This Boy's Life" and Wolff's Vietnam War memoir, "In Pharaoh's Army." Fiction or nonfiction, it's a compact marvel of a book, with its tale of a paradise gained and lost, its study of a young man's emerging character and mind, and its look at the subtlest workings of class-consciousness and prejudice in an idyllic, ideal-driven setting.

The time is the fall of 1960, but other details are less specific. Wolff's narrator — a scholarship student from the Pacific Northwest — goes unnamed. So does the school.

Located somewhere on "the Eastern Seaboard," it includes among its enrollees a number of "book-drunk boys" who spend much of their time working on the literary magazine and anticipating which illustrious writer will visit campus next. The lineup, over the years, has included Edmund Wilson and Robert Penn Warren. As the novel opens, Robert Frost is up next. And the boy who writes the winning entry in the school's annual writing contest will win the privilege of a "private audience" with him.

If this all sounds a tad rarefied, rest assured it is not. Wolff uses his boys' literary passions as a way to explore, in broad terms, how cultural-ethical messages are sent and received. He tips us off early on that this can be a tricky business. The winner of the audience with Frost, for instance, is publicly praised by Frost for his clever lampooning of the poet's style. The boy, alas, intended it as the most sincere homage; the notion that it could be taken for satire leaves him in agony.

There's a moral stake at issue here — should he accept the honor of meeting Frost under such false circumstances? — as well as an aesthetic one.

Moral and aesthetic issues get more complicated still when Ayn Rand, amid great controversy, arrives on campus. Proclaiming her own "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" to be the best American novels of the 20th century (followed by Mickey Spillane), she gives the boys subversive advice — "You must never be meek, the meek shall inherit nothing but a boot on the neck" — and wins our narrator over completely ... until her magic fades for him as suddenly as it appeared.

At this point, one can only admire how vividly and humorously Wolff is chronicling his protagonist's nonstop metamorphoses. Here's a kid whose moral compass is spinning, whose tastes in literature are fly-by-night affairs. Here's a kid, too, who's doing a masterful job of concealing certain truths about himself from both his fellow students and from himself: "I had made myself the picture of careless gentility, ironically cordial when not distracted, hair precisely unkempt, shoes down at heel, clothes rumpled and frayed to perfection. This was the sort of figure I'd been drawn to almost from the beginning; it had somehow suggested sailing expertise, Christmas in St. Anton, inherited box seats, and an easy disregard for all that. By going straight to the disregard I'd hoped to imply the rest."

Imitation can be a form of plagiarism, however. And in writing, as in life, Wolff's protagonist has trouble telling where homage leaves off and something more dishonest begins. The stakes are high. The next big name coming to campus: Ernest Hemingway.

Readers may ask of Wolff: Why a novel this time, instead of a memoir, when the material is so obviously autobiographical? The answer is hinted at in the book's epigraph, taken from poet Mark Strand's "Elegy for My Father": "Why did you lie to me? / I always thought I told the truth./ Why did you lie to me? / Because the truth lies like nothing else and I love the truth."

"Old School" is a slippery mix of truth and fiction — one that takes as its subject the slippery nature of truth and fiction, honesty and dishonesty, sound judgment and seductive delusion. As such, it couldn't be bettered.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com