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9 May 2004
Old School and immigrant literature
I just finished reading Tobias Wolff's "Old School". The novel is a glorious tribute to boarding schools, America caught in a peaceful chasm between the Second World War and Vietnam and above all, its writers. Prof Wolff makes no secret of his admiration for American writers of old -- Hawthorne, Nabokov, Rand, Faulkner, Frost with primary focus on Ernest Hemingway whose persona and style are well-imbued in this work. The story is related in the first-person narrative wherein the narrator recounts his years of adolescence spent in a prestigious New England public school. The narrator speaks nostalgically of his peers, his masters and the writers that visited the school whose attention many including him vied for by writing fiction and poetry that the literary celebrities would cull from during their visits and grant audience to its authors. In between deep and solemn passages where the narrator expounds on the art and nature of writing, the reader is treated to many montages of a life of fearful isolation and implicit rivalry spent in these public schools. I found a subtle beauty in Prof Wolff's writing style so effortless in its delivery that even the most sombre moments in the story passed without much encumbrance though not without making an imprint. Notwithstanding my severely impeded reading habit, "Old School" was a book I cherished reading and am sure is one that I shall go back to many times.Last quarter in our writing class Merrill, who is a writer herself, spoke rather sardonically about the advent of the immigrant literary form brought about by the emergence of writers in the likes of Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali and Amy Tan. I confess that I have not read extensively of these authors but it is a pity that writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Vikram Seth are also cast into this lot (though Vikram Seth may hardly qualify given his rather itinerant tendencies). Take, for instance Ms Lahiri. Her collection of short stories was recommended highly to me by three independent sources and in my euphoria, I picked up "Interpreter of Maladies". There was never a depth of vision or even a breadth of imagery in any of the stories. I found it rather irritating that one story after another seemed to exploit and mock at pre-conceived and immature notions of the Indian middle-class. The confusion of two cultures was never presented more than in a superficial manner and hard as Ms Lahiri might have sought to stay above this conflict, I daresay I detected a contempt for her origins. Needless to say, I shall not be very enthusiastic in setting myself about to read "The Namesake" knowing full well that it shall be a patch on "Old School", irrespective of claims of different genres.
