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Just read Old School by Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life). I found it on the bargain bookshelf at Powerbooks last Sunday while waiting for a friend. Hardcover, P99. The other day I picked it up with the intention of skimming through it before I fell asleep. The next thing I knew the sun had risen and I was on the last page.

Wolff has won many prizes for his stories, but this is his first novel, published in 2003. It’s about a scholarship student at a New England prep school in the early 1960s. The narrator wants to be a writer, and his school emphasizes Literature. Every year a famous writer is invited to give a talk, and one student gets a private audience. In his final year the visiting writer is his idol, Ernest Hemingway. To get the audience his story has to be personally selected by Hemingway. But as the deadline looms, he finds he cannot write the story. Being an adopted member of a tribe (the rich), he has thoroughly imbibed their habits and attitudes while revealing nothing about himself. He hasn’t lied outright, but he hasn’t corrected the misconceptions about himself, either. He’s allowed himself to be mistaken for one of them. You can’t do that when you write a story; it’s an act of revelation.

“The life that produces writing can’t be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind’s business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee.”

Despite the narrator’s adoration of Hemingway, Old School is squarely on Scott Fitzgerald territory: the fascination with the rich, the longing for acceptance by the tribe, and the discovery that it’s not worth it. I’ve always loved Scott Fitzgerald, a fact that has boggled my friends, and as I grew older I figured out why. Being from a middle-middle class background, I was raised to look up to the rich and pretend to be one of them. Being clever, even “adoptable”, I’ve been allowed to observe tribal behavior at closer range, and goddamn Scott is right. The writers we love always tell us the truth. Scott Fitzgerald lied to himself a lot, but he has never lied to me.