Word: clay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Geoffrey Wolff spears both social exculsivity and Princetonian pretension with his witty new novel, The Final Club. Wolff charts the voyage of Nathaniel Clay--a Seattle boy who is half-Jew, half WASP--from the deceptively placid waters of the 1950s, through the stormy seas of the 1960s, and finally to a shipwreck at the end of the 1970s...
...Clay is one of these Hundred Percenters, standing in the rain on the back porch. The theme of the hundred percent, of the extremes of completeness and incompleteness, of wholeness and emptiness, pervades both the novel and Clay's life...
...Clay is not wholly anything--he is half Jewish, half Gentile. His WASP grandparents reject him completely, never having forgiven his father for marrying a Jew. He is the odd third of an otherwise perfect Preferential. His two roommates, Booth Tarkington Griggs and Pownall Hamm, are purebred patricians who breeze into the most exclusive club...
...Clay's story is a search for completeness and for acceptance. His mother's ancestors pioneered west across the Atlantic, across the Mississippi and the Great Plains, finally arriving in Seattle. Clay's journey east, back to the superficial, Puritan world of his father's boyhood is in a sense a journey of alienation. He seeks to enter his father's world to claim a forgotten part of his heritage, but other parts of his heritage forbid him entry...
...Clay finds that the ruthlessness of Bicker is not meant to shape character, but to test it. Only those who possess the perfect graces of class and charm can successfully scale the ivied walls of discrimination...