In A Good School, Richard Yates surveys familiar ground. School is a classic metaphor for growing up, for the biological and cultural passage from youth and innocence to whatever their opposite may be—experience, wisdom, sophistication, disillusionment, corruption….

Such a situation is dangerously susceptible to sentimental nostalgia, but Yates writes about it [and his fictional Dorset Academy] with considerable detachment. Part of the story is told in first-person reminiscences by William Grove, an old Dorset boy who is now a middle-aged writer, but the main narrative is told in the impartial third person, with Grove no more prominent than several of his contemporaries. Grove has had a lot of trouble fitting in at Dorset…. Grove suffers the humiliations we would expect, but he begins to find his way by writing for and eventually editing the school paper, and Yates wisely makes him less a sufferer than a witness...