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...Geoffrey Wolff...
...chief victim of Wolff's sharp prose is the bizarre Princeton tradition of "Bicker," a two-week period of psychological torture originally designed to determine which Princeton men had what it took to join the college's exclusive eating clubs. The tradition has become a not-so-illustrious chapter in the university's illustrious past--many clubs are no longer exclusive, and some students entirely reject the clubs. A recent court decision requiring the two remaining all-male clubs to admit women is the final blow to this bastion of the old boy network...
...Bicker in the late 1950s, as Wolff describes it, was a positively hellish experience. "The institution of Bicker is too perversely odd for my fancy to have fabricated," Wolff writes in the author's note. Sophomores register themselves in "Preferentials," groups of students who want to join the same club. The Preferentials go everywhere together--to meals, to tour the various clubs--but for the most part just wait for the upper-class club members to visit them and ask trite questions meant to discriminate between the gentlemen and the well-not-our-kinds...
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...
...Wolff's novel does a superb job of illustrating the impossibilities of relying on dreams. Just when we think we have captured them, they slip through our grasp and leave us to beat on, boats against the current. Wolff reminds us of Fitzgerald's warning that we cannot resist being borne back ceaselessly into the past...