SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: March 20, 2022] Admission
I had vaguely heard of this book when it came out. My understanding of it was that a woman who worked in the Princeton Admissions office tried to get her kid into the school.
That is not what the story is about exactly. I feel like I’ve conflated this story with the real-life admission scandal that happened in 2019 (because I didn’t really care about it and don’t really know any details thee either).
Rather, what we get is a story of a woman who works at Princeton University’s Admissions and who has a pretty hard time of things in her personal life.
When the book opens we see her on a road trip. She is canvassing the New England area to drop in at schools who are likely to have Princeton applicants. We see some of these visits and get a pretty good idea of how her job works–get the kids excited to go there, but don’t raise their hopes too much since acceptance levels are so low.
One of the schools she goes to is a new school–a kind of alternative program. This year is the first year that someone will be graduating from the school. She stops in and the school is very different from what she is used to. The kids aren’t grist for the college mill. Indeed one of them argues with her about the very point of going to college.
And then there’s the boy, Jeremiah. He is a school nightmare–clearly a genius, and yet nearly failed out of every class he was in because he’d rather read books than do class. And yet, once he got to this new school, he was able to focus a bit. He took AP tests without having taken any AP classes and aced them all. He was a diamond in a very rough package. And the narrator, Portia, believes that Princeton would be a great environment for him.
It turns out also that the head of the school went to college with Portia (different years). He had a crush on her for years but never acted on it because she was dating a frat buddy. He reveals his feelings and something seems to materialize between them.
But she knows it can’t because she has a husband. Well, technically she and Mark aren’t married, but they’ve been living together or a dozen or so years. (I enjoyed Mark’s backstory and his difficult ex-wife and his hard-to-see child). But on the way to Portia’s mother’s house for Thanksgiving, Mark breaks up with her. In the car. He gets out an takes a train home. She continues to her mother’s house.
Portia’s mother is a major character. She has lived the life of a New England lesbian, although she is not one. She had wanted a baby and found a person who would impregnate her (the story of that is pretty funny/sad). She brought Portia up to be independent and to need no one especially a man.
But Portia has always felt that her mother would disapprove of he choices, so she never told her mother anything. About anything. The wall between them became huge even though realistically, her mother probably would have loved to help her. So she doesn’t even tell her mother that Mark left her.
Her mother has a new project though–she has taken in an 18 year old girl who is pregnant. The girl’s family would never accept her situation and Portia’s mother believes that she can be a help to this poor girl (since she’s never become a grandmother from her own daughter). Portia is in total disbelief about this plan and is pretty much just ignoring it (until a friend tells her that if her mother winds up with this baby and then died–Portia’s mother isn’t exactly young–then Portia inherits it).
A lot of the book–like a whole lot–is given to Portia’s musings about the applicants. It’s largely interesting. And Korelitz did work for a time in the Admissions dept. at Princeton, so she has some insights. But I felt like she got really bogged down in these musings. There are many, many , many chapters where she feels bad about the students who are good but not good enough. The students who stress themselves out to get onto an Ivy. The parents who stress out the kids and the university. I appreciated this the first time, but nothing new was added in subsequent observations. I did enjoy reading about all of the individuals who applied (Korelitz is great at creating characters, even if they are only for a paragraph or two), but it was the general musings on the poor kids that was a bit much. Especially since it happens throughout the book, even closer to the end.
So Portia gets back home after the holiday and has a nervous breakdown. She lets her house go to ruin, she barely eats or sleeps. This is actually not atypical during admissions season for her, but she goes a few steps further than usual by not reading her mail or answering her phone at all. She doesn’t even realize that her heater is not working.
She is saved by a helpful friend. And when she finally lifts her head above water she realizes that Jeremiah has applied to Princeton and she has his application. She decides to fight hard to get him in. Especially when Jeremiah and the teacher from his school come to Princeton for a tour and run into her. Jeremiah is so thrilled with the school that she really wants to get him in. And her old friend seems very keen on her as well.
But there’s still about 100 pages left. So what else can happen? Well, Korelitz has a couple of flashbacks in store for us. I didn’t love the revelations. It seemed too implausible. But I did love the whole idea about why she may have always been working with teenagers.
I did enjoy the ending. And I liked seeing all the details about Princeton that I recognized. And, I also thought it made Princeton look very good. But I can’t decide if I’d want to watch the movie, though.
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