Tobias Wolff’s Old School is about a boys school and a case of plagiarism. But the deeper theme is about how we are dishonest, with others and with ourselves, about questions of identity.
The narrator, a scholarship boy, doesn’t tell outright lies about his background. He’s vague. He learns to suggest things. He allows misleading assumptions about himself to stand.
We humans are constantly working on our image, our brand. It’s such a part of what we do that we do it unconsciously.
Spoiler alert: If you plan on reading this book, stop here.
What can bring that unconscious habit of deception into the light?
A case of conspicuous honesty. One of the boys, Purcell, is going to be kicked out of school for refusing to attend chapel. For him, it’s a matter of principle.
He said that God was just a character in a Hebrew novel and if it came to that he’d rather worship Huckleberry Finn. Really, he said, I don’t believe a word of that stuff.
His friends tried to reason with him. Purcell was firm. No more chapel.
Just going through the door makes me a liar, Purcell said. I’m not going to go again.
This act of honesty shocks the narrator into thinking about the roles we play, the performances we give that involve family, ethnicity and class.
By now I’d been absorbed so far into my performance that nothing else came naturally. But I never quite forgot that I was performing. In the first couple of years there’d been some spirit of play in creating the part, refining it, watching it pass. There’d been pleasure in implying a personal history through purely dramatic effects at manner and speech, without ever committing an expository lie, and pleasure in doubleness itself: there was more to me than people knew!
All that was gone. When I caught myself in the act now I felt embarrassed. It seemed a stale, conventional role, and four years of it had left me a stranger even to those I called my friends.
Most of us don’t bother to examine the forces that shape us. I suspect that if Americans who look like me could trace the steps they took from innocent infancy toward an identity as a white person the country would be a better place.
Wolff is an interesting writer who took a stab at a profound topic.
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