Old School

I picked up Old School around a year ago and put it down about fifty pages in. Books about boys in school always seemed to draw too heavily on Salinger, but it was helpful to start reading Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim to see that Salinger himself drew from a larger tradition of "university" novels, and to remember (duh) that no one ever writes anything truly original. In the autobiographical novel Old School Tobias Wolff explores this concept of of influence through the life of a boy on scholarship at a prestigious boarding school.

As the narrator shares the moments he feels shaped him into a writer, he reveals the dangers inherent in telling stories as they suggest themselves in life and writing. When writing a novel, I hear it's helpful to do character sketches that include a lot of backstory you won't put into the book. The more you know your characters, the easier it is to know what they will do and say. But applying the same idea to the people around us can be detrimental to our relationships. I've written recently about how reading widens our circles of acquaintance and helps us better understand those around us, but even we don't know ourselves completely. The stories we invent for those around us are incomplete and may often distort their true character.

If you have a friend with a secret and read a book about a person who shares the same secret, taking the character's thoughts and motivations as your friend's has complications: predicting their behavior can bring disappointment or may simply prevent you from getting to know the "real" person. In Old School, the narrator finds out that he shares a secret with his roommate, Bill: they're both Jewish. At their WASPy institution, that tidbit could mean social ostracism and both boys work hard to conceal it. While divulging their shared heritage to each other could bring the boys together, the narrator chooses not to reveal his background, turning what could have been a close friendship turns into estrangement when the narrator not only keeps quiet about his own story but parasitically takes on what he perceives to be Bill's story. The narrator was raised Catholic and is only Jewish by way of his mother whereas Bill actually goes to synagogue and is Jewish culturally; the narrator adopts an attitude of alienation and ostracism that are not his to adopt. (This is a comment I have seen made in movies and books by other Jewish people. Memorably, it was in a "Seinfeld" episode where a character wants to become Jewish just so he can tell Jewish jokes.)

Taking someone else's story for your own can be just as destructive as mistakenly telling their story. The misuse of story can destroy a relationship, but it can also damage self-knowledge. If instead of examining your motivations, actions and decisions through the lense of your beliefs and philosophy you take too literally the paths of characters in your life or in books, you risk stunting personal growth.

Ultimately, I think this is more of an adolescent problem, and this plays out in the book as well (to a certain extent; the narrator's sense of self is still questionable in the end). For lack of experience, teenagers have to have something to model their behavior on, and from my memory I know that I patterned heated conversations on TV shows and emulated the feelings of those around me when dealing with my parents. Until I turned inward to assess myself and my desires I took for granted that every person patterns her behavior on others. I think it's an important stage in development to pass from seeing the protagonists of every book as yourself to seeing them as beings all their own.