Admission by Jean
Hanff Korelitz is not a book I necessarily recommend. I honestly didn’t much like the protagonist,
Portia, and yet I’ve read it all the way through; it certainly retained my
interest.
What kept my interest in this quite-dense book? Well, I actually enjoyed the ongoing
discussions of the admissions processes for the Ivy Leagues. The author herself was a part-time reader for
the admissions office at Princeton for a couple of years, so she has given it
all such thorough consideration that I was impressed at Portia’s integrity
about the process. She’d lean a little
too much one way—but only for a few pages, and then she’d draw back and be more
balanced. She dealt with my reservations and questions, on a philosophical and
moral level, about the whole admissions process. Occasionally Portia would lose
her temper over reasonable concerns and laments by those who were disappointed
in the results of the process, and I was impatient with Portia for this—because
when it wasn’t application season, she was out there encouraging those kids to
apply, getting their hopes up. So for
her to turn around and have no patience for the complaints of families of the
brilliant, near-perfect students getting turned away…well, nope, again not
sympathetic.
As a sidenote, I partly enjoyed reading this book because it
was validation for me as a writer! I am
told again and again not to include history in my novel because it takes away
from the story-arc. Yet the reason I choose to read historical fiction at all is
to have history brought to life. Throwing in historical details adds value and
reality to the writing. Conversations about political situations bring us into
the period authentically. I find a
similar situation with this book. My
favorite passages of Admission are actually
when Portia goes on her diatribes about the admissions process, which take up
much of the book, most often in conversation form. It’s nice to see it from her perspective and
to appreciate the balance the admissions officers try to maintain. As my
daughter and I are looking at colleges for her right now, it’s somewhat
fascinating to contemplate.
My son actually was interviewed to go to Princeton. Only in reading this book did I realize he
might not have gotten so far without his national-level award, which was a
little extraneous to his main efforts and who he is, perhaps why he didn’t get
in. I’d never have guessed it to be a critical factor in his being invited for
an interview, in his obtaining admission.
I leave feeling disquieted at the broad encouragement for
normal, excellent students to apply for the Ivy Leagues. It’s clear that unless the students have
extremely disadvantaged backgrounds or have achieved national honors at some
level, most have little hope of being admitted.
Since the book begins with Portia delivering her, “Apply to Princeton!”
sales pitches to high school students, with no mention of how incredibly
unlikely it is for those who don’t have unusual qualifications (even 4.0s and
perfect SATs don’t cut it, apparently) to get in, I was dismayed to learn this
only well into the book, when she was assigning scores based on these factors—numerical
scores that generally precluded exceptional students with otherwise
unremarkable achievements from getting in.
Only the exotic, eccentric, and massively-achieved-outside-of-sheer-academics-alone
need apply! (It doesn’t count to be
service-oriented or to volunteer regularly, etc.) But then, I get why they’d want a variety of
applicants. After all, aside from trying
for diversity and wanting to keep their ranking high (they’re ranked #1 for
undergrad universities), which is largely dependent on how many rejection
letters they get to hand out, they do want a certain variety of students on
campus—like singers and rugby players and the like. I don’t pay much attention to sports, but
Portia and the admissions officers want a vibrant, wholistic campus life. And…I sorta get that. So someone with a noted talent, like singing,
might get in with a solid SAT and excellent grades. To find the best of those folks, they want a
broad applicant pool. It’s in the school’s best interests for all students to
apply, to broaden the base for their Office of Admission to pick and choose.
Still, there’s something wrong with Portia taking offense to
the upset applicants and their families.
When one mother says, “It’s a disaster!” or something of that nature,
Portia makes an intelligent, well-thought-out response about how higher
education is better than it’s ever been, how excellent the state universities
so often are, how many good choices students have nowadays. I liked her reply, but I didn’t like her
contempt. Because it is rather a disaster to get so many
near-perfect students’ hopes up—and waste their time—only to dash them because
those students really have little-to-no chance of getting in. Not if they come from an unremarkable family
and haven’t achieved something extraordinary (these factors are not specified in the recruitment
speeches). Minorities might have a
slightly greater chance, and they are looking to round out things, as I said,
so I do see why they’re reaching out so broadly, but it’s still a disaster for
the incredibly intelligent, hard-working kids who don’t stand out. Oh, and she made it clear that Princeton
could easily fill its halls only with legacy kids, but that 2/3 of the legacy
applicants are still rejected. Granted, they have a greater chance of getting
in than the other applicants, but with nature-and-nurture from parents with
Ivy-League educations and the very best primary and secondary educations their
money can buy, shouldn’t they naturally stand a somewhat better chance, even if
the Office of Admission were blind to their legacies?
Okay, so I’ve gone on about the admissions process, but
there is an underlying life story for Portia.
Stop reading now if you don’t want a spoiler!
**
SPOILER ALERT!
**
I am captivated at the moment by the fact that Portia’s
offspring, who was adopted out seventeen years earlier, is an eccentric who
reads like mad. When we finally hear of
Portia’s pregnancy, how she took a break from school, got a tiny apartment, and
spent almost all her time alone reading classics, it makes a mother’s heart
ache with joy and sympathy and the beauty of that connection between them. Portia hasn’t made much of it, but you do
wonder how much of what the mother does during her pregnancy rubs off on her
children. I don’t know too much about
what my own mother was up to when she had me except that she was caring for a
two-year-old boy and that she went into labor a month early while trying to cut
our huge yard with a push mower! She was
only two days out from her scheduled Cesarean, and she didn’t want it to be overgrown
when she returned—when she did get back, she was furious that nobody had
bothered to cut the small patch she hadn’t been able to finish. I’ve always found that story entertaining,
and it’s fun to think how this might have influenced me. Pregnant women often get
that tidying urge just before labor, and I also went into labor with my son
after cleaning and carrying boards out to the shed (he was just a week early). Since my mother was a stay-at-home mom, I
can’t isolate any of her influences to the period of pregnancy. I rather think they’re from later,
mostly. But still, it’s nice to see this
charming correlation at the end of the novel between Portia and her son. The rest
of the book is almost exceptionally uninspired.
Just nuts-and-bolts reality.
Another reviewer found the book’s romance unrealistic, and I
do have to agree. The way she comes
across her adopted son is unrealistic, too, perhaps—though there’s something to
be said for that magical draw between mother and child. I can go for that, from a romantic’s point of
view. The romance with her lover,
though, bothered me from a number of perspectives. One, she slept with him without a moment’s
thought to cheating on her 15-year partner.
You might believe this if she were a serial cheater (she wasn’t—she
hadn’t been with anyone else in 15 yrs, and only two men before that). You might believe this if she were
drunk—possibly. You might even believe
this if there were an intense romance in their past, and she were caught up in
the moment. But honestly, when she slept
with him, it didn’t even sound very romantic.
Almost sordid, it definitely rang of ‘serial cheater’. I think the author was trying for the
shock-factor, for the reader to be stunned when she revealed that Portia had a
partner already. And then, later, when
we find out he’s having an affair and the woman’s pregnant, maybe we’re
supposed to conclude that Portia somehow intuited this affair.
Portia is a strange, cold woman, though. She falls into depression, but you’re never
even sure exactly what she’s depressed about. You can guess. There’s a myriad of
possibilities. She’s surprised about the affair, and then she just sort of
shuts down, and it’s so extreme that it doesn’t make sense that this new guy
would be later attracted to her when she must reek. Portia has him over to her
disaster-of-a-house, where nothing has been cleaned for months, and there’s
this romantic interlude that I’m completely disbelieving about. The place is disgusting. And then!
When Portia’s going to go out with the new lover, she takes a shower,
can find no clean clothes of her own that aren’t fancy (put on that cocktail
dress, for God’s sake! Or go shopping. Or use your washer!), and so wears her
ex’s clothes. Just no, no, no! I was appalled. What in the world?
Okay, I’ve given away so much of the book here, and I
suppose I’m being too idealistic, perhaps.
What happens in reality often doesn’t conform to what we imagine things
should be like. It’s only that the
author hardly acknowledges the strangeness of so much of what Portia does.
The book does bring up a few questions for me. As in, when Portia finds out she’s pregnant,
the man she loves has already dumped her for another woman. So Portia doesn’t tell him about the
pregnancy. Not to be mean. She just doesn’t. And later, she says he had a right to know
about the child. Yet…he went on with his
life, married the new girlfriend, and didn’t have to suffer like Portia
did. He didn’t follow up with Portia,
either. So…did he really have a right to
know? Maybe? It is a little sad that he didn’t know,
especially after the baby was born. But
then, he brought that on himself. If he
had a right to know in that instance (seriously, when she let the baby go for
adoption, she could have given the child into the hands of his wealthy family),
then what if knowing that would have led her to choose an abortion? Does he have a right to know, given a
pro-choice sentiment here? The book
provoked this question for me.
While I was appalled at how he broke up with her, I also
thought that although she was madly in love with him that she didn’t quite
deserve him. She was contemptuous of his
belief that there was no-such-thing as class, still contemptuous that he had
gone back to marry a Bostonian blond young woman and all. But given her contempt, I don’t blame him. It
must have shown at the time (at least, it sounded as though it would have). He’d
likely found someone more aligned with his views, who didn’t scoff at his
attempts to be color-blind and race-blind.
Portia, by the way, was of Jewish heritage, though it wasn’t a belief
system so much as simply an ethnicity. He loved all of her ‘exotic’ qualities
and appreciated her disapproving mother. Sheesh, I’m not sure how much harder
he could have tried there—and I wasn’t convinced he would actually find her so
exotic as she seemed to believe he did.
She felt different and strange, and she projected her beliefs onto
him. Perhaps. But my sympathies were with her when he so
lightly broke up with her. Maybe he
wasn’t really serious about her. But
after several months together, it was awful of him to dump her in Europe like
that. Again, since it would be rather
humiliating for a dumped woman to ‘chase’ after a man, does he really have a
right to know she’s pregnant after treating her that way? And what if she’s pregnant but decides she
really doesn’t want to be with him, doesn’t want to be pregnant, etc.? I have to go with it being her choice, but I
did balk a little at the thought of her adopting out without letting him
know. While he may have preferred not to
have the disruption, it seems just unfair that he wouldn’t have the chance to
be the parent of his own child before a stranger would. Then again, he’d dumped
her, and she’d have had to face the scorn of his family; she just wanted
something quiet, so that she could go back to her own life without having to
face the public with it. Honestly, she might not have chosen to have the child
if she had to face all that. So there’s
a consideration…
So, the author brought up this difficult question for me unintentionally,
I believe. She wasn’t really exploring
these ideas, but we all get something different out of what we read.
This book called to me just as I was looking at college
rankings. I knew it was on my shelves, but so are hundreds of other books that
will never be read... It’s taken a while
to read, and it’s not exactly inspirational, but it is fascinating for those of
us who have considered the Ivy Leagues for ourselves or for our children. Portia repeatedly claims that there are a
slew of excellent non-fiction books on the subject, also by former admission
officers, but I’ve never bothered to find them.
This one just came into my hands, maybe at a library sale—and it is
fiction, and it does pick up at the end, surprisingly so.
If you prefer novels and think you might enjoy considering
long discussions about how Ivy League students should be selected, this may be
the book for you. Portia answers dozens
of questions on this topic with insight and depth. I am finishing the novel with more respect
for the struggle that their Office of Admission is going through—and more
insight as to what they’re looking for.
That said, unless my daughter publishes a book or does something else
truly remarkable, I doubt I will encourage her to apply to the Ivy Leagues.
Beyond all that, Portia pushed people away and walled herself off from her very loving mother, rejecting anything that hinted of ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ and even ‘vegetarian’. It was a bit strange, since she was raised by a mother highly aware of these issues. Even though Portia remained determinedly clueless as to how those benefit our health and society, she seemed to believe that she is ‘a force for good in this world’. As far as her profession as a Princeton admissions officer went, perhaps she was fine (though I worry that she’d have been biased against some of the very best people). But to reject all that her mother taught her? I understand sometimes when folks raised conventionally have trouble seeing differently, but for this narrow-minded woman, I have little sympathy.
