This is reminiscent of a larger embarrassment in American publishing history. Wolff was also sorry for the writer so desperate for publication that he’d resorted to copying other writers’ work. It’s a telling note regarding both Wolff and Jones that when I notified them about what had happened, both were concerned for the magazine first. Needless to say, we were less than delighted when we had to apologize in a subsequent issue for having unintentionally played a part in a case of plagiarism. It was a well-cobbled-together forgery using the plot of Wolff’s “The Rich Brother” and certain paragraphs directly lifted from Jones’s “A White Horse.” We were fooled and delighted to publish it. Some ten years ago, a writer sent us a story plagiarized from two authors-Thom Jones and Tobias Wolff. Wolff’s new novel, Old School, concerns, among other things, an instance of plagiarism. Stories included are: "The Missing Person," "Say Yes," "The Poor Are Always With Us," "Sister," "Soldier's Joy," "Desert Breakdown," "Our Story Begins," "Leviathan," and "The Rich Brother.Something that Bill Bradley asks Tobias Wolff in this issue’s interview calls to my mind an embarrassing moment in The Missouri Review‘s past.
As he moves among these unfortunates, Wolff observes the disparity between their realities and their dreams, in ten stories of exhilarating lucidity and grace.
An aging soldier is distracted from a night of philandering by a gun-toting neighbor and a suicidal enlisted man. A show-biz hopeful undergoes a dubious audition in a hearse speeding across the California desert. A gentle priest finds himself in a Vegas hotel with a hysterical, sun-burned stranger. Unfortunately, the men and women in these gripping, pungent, and wonderfully skewed stories have only the vaguest notion of what normal is. To Tobias Wolff's characters, Back in the World is where lives that have veered out of control just might become normal again. To American soldiers in Vietnam, "back in the world" meant America and safety.
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