Never a huge best-seller, ''This Boy's Life'' nonetheless helped turn the memoir into the dominant narrative form of the '90s, setting the stage for such chart-toppers as Frank McCourt's ''Angela's Ashes'' and Dave Eggers' ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.'' In 1993, director Michael Caton-Jones translated ''This Boy's Life'' to the big screen, starring Robert De Niro, Ellen Barkin, and Leonardo DiCaprio.
In a sense, ''Old School'' seems to pick up where ''This Boy's Life'' left off. Like the young Tobias of the memoir, the novel's unnamed narrator is a perceptive wise guy who views himself as an outsider and underdog yearning for transcendent accomplishment. He wants to be a writer, and like many of the boys at the school he idolizes the famous authors (Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and, above all, Ernest Hemingway) who occasionally visit to give readings. The school has a tradition whereby the boys in their final years can submit a piece of writing to win a private audience with the visiting eminence. In ''Old School,'' Wolff turns this literary competition into a contest as riveting as a good championship series, the narrator dissecting the other contenders as he makes his own play for the prize. The novel is a searing portrait of adolescent drunkenness, and the hooch they're guzzling in this story is literature.
Clearly Wolff is evoking a different era in America. The book does not, for example, contain a single reference to television. (The only time, in fact, that Wolff recalls having seen television during his brief tenure at the Hill School was in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the boys were all summoned to a master's suite to listen to Kennedy's press conference. One of the other students in the room with Wolff that night was his hallmate Oliver Stone.) ''Old School'' captures the moment just before everything in America changed -- the last instant before the assassinations and the Beatles and the war in Vietnam.
''You're looking at something that doesn't know it's about to be cracked open wide,'' Wolff says. ''Almost a remnant psychology that's like some island where they discovered Stone Age people, and this place is about to get discovered but it doesn't know it yet. It's in that last moment of its somewhat self-assured existence.''
A patient writer, Wolff is now working on a new collection. He typically takes months to finish a story. He writes in the morning -- afternoons when he can swing it -- in a windowless carrel in the basement of Stanford's library. The small room contains no phone, no photographs, the only books a dictionary and a handful of reference texts, the only sounds the ones he makes as he paces, trying to crack another sentence or conjure another distant memory.
''Who knows where one's work comes from?'' he muses. ''Certainly I know that the life I lead, a rather regular and privileged life, is not the way life is for most people in the world. Because I know it just ain't this way, I'm kind of ready for the whole thing to vanish at any moment.''
(This is an online-only excerpt from Entertainment Weekly's Nov. 7, 2003, issue.)
