Admission

I am really glad I don't have a kid heading toward college any time soon. Reading Jean Hanff Korelitz's fictionalized account of working for Princeton University Admissions brought all sorts of anxiety-inducing images of what it's like for kids to get into (admittedly highly selective) colleges these days. Admission was actually a lot of fun at first. Each chapter begins with a presumably fake, but believably varied excerpt from an application such as: "My favorite saying is 'no guts, no glory' I can't recall who said it first, but whenever I'm in trouble or facing a big challenge, I think about this saying." Or "I have engaged in a myriad of activities at my school, none more meaningful to me than accompanying the A Cappella choir." Really, they're all special in their own way and usually tie into the chapter.

Portia Nathan is a 38 year old veteran of two admissions jobs (Dartmouth and Princeton). She's not burnt-out but she is at a crossroads in her life. The fact that she's been living the past 16 years with a professor at Princeton (sans marriage) comes out to the reader only after she sleeps with a former classmate from Dartmouth whom she meets for the first time on a recruiting trip. He works for a weird little alternative school in rural NH and you just know the kids she meets there are going to cycle back into the story in ways that the kids she meets at Deerfield Academy on the same day are not. So, yeah, all is not necessarily happy and settled with Portia, in spite of early appearances.

I loved the sense of getting inside information. Portia insists (often and relentlessly to desperate parents) that there's no rule book or secret formula for kids to get accepted at Princeton, but this book almost shows that there is. Still, admissions officers come off as almost glamorous and thoughtful and fair. It certainly seems an exciting, if exhausting, job even if most of the time a lot of people hate you and find you supremely underqualified to hold the balance of their children's lives in your hands.

A lot of the book is very interesting and the characters are all good: Portia's reactionary, uber-liberal (but secretly wealthy) mother living in Vermont via Northampton, MA (bastions of liberalism, of course); Portia's live-in lover English professor, their barely-social good friend who is a philosopher, the nutty professor who finally loses it spectacularly...the list goes on because Korelitz has a good ear for dialogue and voices. The kids she meets (and there are tons of them) are generally believable and recognizeable without making them caricatures.

Things do fall apart in the book. I can almost mark the section that caused my first sinking feeling that there was going to be a really contrived coming together of all sorts of loose ends. Not all of my connect-the-dots predictions came true, but the fact that one of them did (and it's a biggie) kind of ruined the book for me. Still, by all means, read this for the entertainment and the writing (which is pretty good). Also, if you know New England at all, it's a lot of fun. I grew up practically in the embrace of Dartmouth so I loved walking the streets with Portia, recognizing all the landmarks, though I've got a few picky things to say about that, too. If she's going to be hyper-specific about landmarks and streets, then she can't turn around and make places up completely. The Ice Cream Machine did NOT in any believable way become a Hemp Emporium (which Hanover, NH probably couldn't support anyway) but a very tasty Indian restaurant. But I'm just being picky, of course, and an author can make up all she wants.

I love her description of NH as it is seen nestled strangely between ultra-liberal Vermont and Massachusetts. To be sure, NH has changed dramatically since my childhood, so much so that I was confused for a moment when she called it the "reddest of red states" but she's spot on: Vermont was Massachusett's natural sibling, its cousin up north. One drove up to Vermont to visit friends, and friends of friends, and to attend music festivals and solar energy festivals and peace festivals. But nobody you knew lived in New Hampshire, land of Live Free or Die. Over there they were too busy incubating right-wing politicians and shooting their guns to take much of a look at solar energy or--God forbid--peace. Love it! Just don't read that to my uber-liberal New Hampshire mother, or her peace group.