Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz

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!

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SPOILER ALERT!

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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.