Before the end of the chapter he’s going back to his first love: Hemingway. Rand had been dismissive when he’d asked her a question about him, and now he decides that what makes Hemingway great is his openness to the imperfections of what our narrator thinks of as real life. And Hemingway’s characters inhabit a recognisable society, not some imaginary arena paced about by monstrous egos. And guess who’s going to be the next visiting writer?
What on earth is our boy to do? Chapter 6 is the most tortured yet, as he obsessively types and re-types copies of the great man’s greatest stories. All around he can hear his rivals typing and typing. And all around there’s also the sense of something coming to an end. Two boys are expelled for adult vices – sex and smoking – and another nearly is for the unacceptably un-boyish crime of flaunting his atheism. This is their last term, and the narrator’s fraught days and nights of not writing are made worse by a kind of
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Before he decides to do this, I found myself complaining at the preposterous way the story he finds so precisely mirrors his own life: scholarship kid from a poor urban one-parent family carefully manipulates people (family and friends) to keep afloat a highly comfortable new-found lifestyle. All he has to do is change the gender of the narrator and a few other details. But it’s ridiculous to complain. We’re not supposed to be taking any of this as the literal truth: Wolff is making literature and the cult of great writing do a lot of work, and the discovery of a story whose unlikely aptness Wolff openly acknowledges is, I suppose, about to open up a moral can of worms. The narrator, in his overwrought state, sees the story he has discovered as his chance to reveal who he really is. So how can his use of it in the competition be anything but