Class Picture by Tobias Wolff, 2003
The magic trick:
Developing a full bench of interesting sub-characters
It’s 1960, and Robert Frost is visiting our narrator’s prep school. The student whose poem wins the contest gets to spend an afternoon visiting with the esteemed guest. The narrator spends considerable pages breaking down the competition for us. So it seems we have a competition story.
But it’s so much more than that. This really is a quietly great story. There is genius in every corner you look.
Now truth be told, this doubles as the first chapter of Wolff’s memoir of childhood Old School. So it makes sense that there is more here getting set up beyond the anecdote itself.
Still, though, it’s remarkable. Every character who shows up – even in the smallest of roles – establishes themselves memorably in the reader’s mind. I’m not sure how he does it, of course. My best guess is that he introduces every character here with a problematic characteristic or an unresolved problem. Then the story moves on elsewhere. So each character is like a mini-conflict unto themselves, which makes them very attractive to the reader. Perhaps that’s how he does it?
And that’s quite a trick on Wolff’s part.
The selection:
How did they command such deference-English teachers? Compared to the men who taught physics or biology, what did they really know of the world? It seemed to me, and not only to me, that they knew exactly what was most worth knowing. Unlike our math and science teachers, who modestly stuck to their subjects, they tended to be polymaths. Adept as they were at dissection, they would never leave a poem or a novel strewn about in pieces like some butchered frog reeking of formaldehyde. They’d stitch it back together with history and psychology, philosophy, religion, and even, on occasion, science. Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too.
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