Old School, Tobias Wolff

Wolff’s book about a young man at a prep school who wants to be a writer, as do all his friends. Starts slow, sneaks up on you. Quite strong. In  this passage the narrator is in his last meeting with fellow seniors who work on the school literary journal, and are arguing about whether to print the submission of one of their fellow students who they have consistently rejected.

There’s something there, Bill said.

Come on, I said.

Oh, for Christ’s sake, run the stupid thing! George said. Who cares? It’s not like the rest of this crap’s about to set the world on fire. When we looked at him hi bristled and said, Well, is it?

Of course the answer was no. Our schoolboy journalwas not going to set the world on fire. But for  the past year we’d been acting on the faith that it might, choosing and shaping every issue with the solemnity of Big Jeff  designing a spaceship. So, the game was over—that’s what George was telling us, the  prick, the  spoiler. He’d somehow lost his innocence and now he couldn’t rest until we too had seen that our sanctum sanctorum was only a storage room, our high purposes not worth a fart in a gale of wind.

But George, of all people—what  had  worked this change in him? What had he been writing up in that airless room, what  vein of acid knowledge had he struck?

Okay, I said. What the hell. Let’s run it.

So we’d come to the end; our last issue was laid to rest, albeit with a bullet in its head. The others fled the  room, leaving me to order and stack the manuscripts and hand them off to the incoming editor, a fifth former who’d been sitting in on the meeting to see how it was done. He  looked pretty disappointed.

Mr. Rice’ll need those first thing tomorrow, I told him.

I know.