Word: clays
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...Mexico's President Carlos Salinas de Gortari made sure all the stops were pulled out for this exhibit. The country's biggest media mogul, Emilio Azcarraga, put up the money. An unprecedented tonnage of basalt, clay, obsidian, jade, gilt, inlaid wood and painted canvas has been moved out of Mexican churches, museums and private collections -- sometimes over protests by local communities that resent having their saints or gods borrowed by the government. On view are 365 objects, starting in l000 B.C. with a five-ton stone Olmec head and finishing in 1949 with Frida Kahlo's The Love-Embrace...
...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...
...almost accidentally, Clay discovers he feels most complete while studying literature with his professor and friend Johnny Hyde. Literature plays such an important role in Clay's life--both at Princeton and outside the academy--that The Final Club at times takes on the quality of meta-fiction. Clay and Hyde debate the implications of Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby: Can a person be complete depending only on dreams? What happens when people's dreams eclipse their lives? Do the fictionalized tales we tell--and believe--about ourselves matter more than the actual truth...
Highlighting these questions are the personal documents Wolff scatters throughout The Final Club. The documents are examples of the institutionalized mix of truth and falsehood we all encounter and produce in forms like college applications. Clay's and his classmates' contributions to their alumni reports and their children's application essays to Princeton are minor works of literature compared to Pope and Dryden, but they posess a clumsy eloquence and--to their creators--are infinitely more important than some long-forgotten poem...