Word: clay
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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...
Nathaniel Clay, Wolff's hero, attended Princeton in the late '50s -- as did Wolff -- and was snubbed by adolescent aristocrats there, who failed to invite him, in the excruciating selection process oddly called "Bicker," to join one of the university's exclusive and very social eating clubs. Clay's offense seemed to be not so much that he came from a prosperous, partly Jewish Seattle family, but that he was unrepentant about this shortcoming. He acted uppity, as if he had nothing to be ashamed of. Thus it was necessary that he be humbled, and the cruelty with which this...
Richard writes a preface to each section of the book but otherwise lets his father do the recollecting. A clay-poor Georgia farm boy, Dean Rusk tells with self-effacing charm how he hustled to get an education (Davidson and Oxford) and endured World War II service as an infantry staff officer. John Kennedy surprised Rusk, and most everyone else, by making him Secretary of State, and Lyndon Johnson kept him on. The cold war convinced Rusk that free nations must hang together in a nuclear age. So when Communist forces threatened South Vietnam, the Secretary saw no alternative...