Old School

American writer Tobias Wolff's novel is set in 1960 in a snobbish New England boarding school.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
I think this is really a classic. I think this is a book that's going to be read for a long time. It's going to fit in to a kind of genre, the prep school novel alongside Salinger and John Knowles' A Separate Peace which is a very similar kind of book. The use of that closed society of the school to explore all kinds of ideas about identity, but in this case also about writing in a remarkable way. It's so eloquent about writing. Also, I was very moved by this, about teaching. Tobias Wolff himself now teaches at Stanford. He articulates in a way that I don't think anyone else ever has, what it feels like to teach, how you get involved and caught up in it, how you are changed by it. Incredible sympathy for the teachers, who play a very unexpected role in the book. It's not just about the kids.

KIRSTY WARK:
And Tobias Wolff does expose himself as he did in his own memoirs about appropriating other materials. He appropriates this wonderful story in order to win the chance to see Hemingway?

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH:
And I must say, when I got to that part, I closed the book and I went to sleep - I was that touched by that. I was like, "No... Please don't." But what was wonderful was that, at every part of this novel - and I did struggle to differentiate between it being a novel or a short story - but I loved it. He just captures every nuance, every small beat, that leads you to believe that every part of the book is truthful.

KIRSTY WARK:
He also gets a chance with his portrayals of Robert Frost and Ayn Rand, to put his own take on it.

PAUL MORLEY:
And Hemingway. The idea that they in their work licence themselves as fictional characters - is then liberated by that and deals with them. Yes, he deals with them as these wonderful celebrities of ideas that make you yearn for that period in the early '60s when teenagers were lusting for these people with ideas.

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
But they weren't really. He invents this Utopia.

PAUL MORLEY:
But you imagined that it could become so. I agree; it's an absolute classic. It's a book about being a teenager. You would have thought we had run out of ideas for this particular type of a book. He has completely refreshed the whole notion. I love the idea of this story to meet Hemingway where he copies someone. It's interesting reading how Guston would also copy masterpieces. When you think by copying Hemingway, the subtext in a way is by doing it, as long as he knew what he was doing, it is a work of art in itself, and by becoming a writer, he proved it.

KIRSTY WARK:
But he doesn't shy away from some very difficult issues, such as Jewishness, class, snobbery and this feeling of not fitting in.

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
It's also about lying and repenting, They are all about lying in a way, but I think Tobias Wolff really gets into the profoundly ethical issues, issues of who are we and does a writer ever have a real self to disclose.

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH:
I was taken by his explanation of what makes a writer; of why we write. Of why we do what we do and that you are somehow born. You don't know the moment - there is no moment where you say, "I am now a writer."

PAUL MORLEY:
I think ultimately, it becomes a great work of literary criticism as well as a memoir and a novel. It has that dimension to it.

KIRSTY WARK:
I want to ask you about the construction of it. There is, as it were, a kind of false end, which you would think perhaps there was a kind of epilogue, but it's much more integral than that.

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
It's much more profound than that.

KIRSTY WARK:
It's an extra wonderful treat.

ELAINE SHOWLATER:
He is telling this as an adult looking back on his useful self, which is a device that is very frequently used, but he really learns more. It isn't simply that he goes back to the youthful self with the wisdom of age, but he finds things out at the end that we didn't know, and it really resonates with the story. There is this wonderful idea of this whole school full of writers! They weren't. All of these boys who want nothing more than to win a literary prize - what a marvellous idea!

PAUL MORLEY:
By telling this great lie, he becomes a writer. It's a fantastic idea.