I am going to say my worst thing first. Stand by for enthusiastic praise. Tobias Wolff is a short story writer, and in Old School, his first novel, you can tell. It is less like a novel, and more like a collection of short stories about the same characters on the same theme. Mostly this was fine, but the last two chapters felt weird and abrupt, in a way they wouldn’t have done if this were a collection of short stories. Only if it had been a collection of short stories, I’d probably never have read it. That would have…
42 Comments