Word: wolff
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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...
...FINAL CLUB by Geoffrey Wolff...
...antipathy whirls about these days that it is hard to care as deeply as you are supposed to -- hard even to remember -- that they won't let your son, the grocery bag boy, into their daughter's debutante ball. Which is why it is hard to care about Geoffrey Wolff's new novel...
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...
...Still, readers may feel that the hero's affronted psyche is a bit fragile. Novelist John O'Hara, who never went to college, used to be fascinated by this sort of folderol, and his friends joked about taking up a collection to send him to Princeton. Wolff is a skilled memoirist (The Duke of Deception) and novelist (Inklings), but maybe somebody should arrange a scholarship for him at Michigan State...