Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Neverland Cult

Korelitz never disappoints. She writes what she knows about. And she writes about it well. In this case she writes about the insanely competitive process of getting admission to Princeton University, where she did work at one time in the Admission (no 's', thus creating an interesting sub-plot) Office.

Korelitz's raw material is the young people who want to become undergraduate members of the institution, and their parents who are prepared to mortgage their own lives to allow it, and the professionals who pretend to some sort of objectivity in sorting out the intellectual wheat from the merely ambitious chaff. But her far more interesting subject is the mores and obsessions of the American middle class. Not the entire middle class population to be sure, but certainly an identifiable segment large enough to supply the applications to fill available Ivy League university placements ten times over.

Admission can be read as a commentary on the material culture of this part of bourgeois America. And indeed there is a lot of conspicuous consumption of educational commodities apparently going on. But I don’t think Korelitz is that trite. Among other things such a slant wouldn’t fit with her signature denouement. There’s something far subtler she has in mind, the burden of which she places on her heroine who progressively discovers how the process she is a key part of has consumed her.

What is being produced, distributed, consumed and digested isn’t material at all. It isn’t even something as ephemeral as ‘education’ which still has some degree of concreteness in terms of human welfare. In fact, what is being pursued by the cast of characters in Admission is clearly and entirely immaterial: expectations. Expectations not of anything meaningful to those students, teachers and administrators involved except… for yet further expectations. A fragment of the life-long process of increasing abstraction from any possible personal need, including purely selfish or material betterment.

The situation, oddly in a proudly secular society, is not unlike that of adherence to church doctrine in the Middle Ages: the creedal dogmas of the Trinity, the Virgin Birth and the Atonement, among others, may not have meant the slightest thing to the daily lives of even the most educated or pious citizen, yet they were considered essential beliefs for some deferred reward. Rubric was, in a sense, its own reward. That is, strict adherence to the ritual was enough to ensure grace, the ultimate expectation of salvation, at least for the elect. The metaphor is more than casual: submission to the common entrance examination (Baptism), studious preparation of the application (Confirmation), the self-revelatory interview (Confession), are essential preludes for that all important receipt of the acceptance letter (Communion) in the ritual of university admission.

This de-materialisation begins even before the prep school stage that is the focus of Korelitz’s fiction. There is of course the pre-prep school which functions to allow entry to the best private and selective schools. In England it is these schools which are essential for entrance into Eton, and Wellington, Marlborough and the other ‘public’ schools which the Americans classify as ‘prep’. And the process continues with increasing intensity at university and beyond.

Think about it. At what point do the children’s’ lives described by Korelitz become in any meaningful way better? Getting into Princeton does not mean beer and skittles or an American version of Brideshead Revisited for the next four years. It means gruelling, relentless graft, sixteen hour days, and pervasive anxiety about the next set of expectations - graduate school or employment. These latter expectations, once met, will demand even greater commitment to the next set, namely career advancement. The pursuit of greater and greater expectations leads not to relative comfort and security, regardless of one's bank balance or net worth, but to white-collar drudgery and a kind of well-paid insecurity

The process is documented by many accomplished authors, but two in particular seem most apt to frame with Admission. The American prep school experience, for example, is the subject of Louis Auchincloss’s 1965 novel The Rector of Justin. The eponymous rector founds a school to produce an end product of comprehensible human import: young men of character who understand certain values like responsibility, discernment, and integrity. He fails utterly because, well, times were changing. The emerging corporate world did not need character, it needed high expectations which can be ’sold’ as valuable in themselves to others in order to both motivate and enrich.

Karen Ho’s cultural-anthropological study of 2008, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, shows how the level of expectations after university becomes more brutal and more removed from any sort of well-being. She, as it happens, is a Princeton graduate who knows first-hand as well as professionally the experience of competing for the honour of ‘top’ positions in investment banking and consulting firms.

I scare-quote ’top’ only because the positions offered are explicitly described and experienced as demanding an even higher level of commitment than that required at university, notably by permitting no interference in a candidate’s professional life by private concerns. “If you are the best, you will of course want to stay in the company of the best, which is why you will want to join us,” advertise Goldman Sachs or McKinsey & Company or Bankers Trust at their Princeton recruitment soirees. The likelihood is that successful candidates will be exploited as relatively cheap labour for two to three years and then discarded (associate billing rates are typically three times or more of their salaries; it is no coincidence that the duration of a young persons career coincides roughly with the period it takes for the billing rate to approach his or her compensation).

The expectations only get harder to bear and more physically and emotionally exhausting as they are met. ‘Expectations for’ slowly morph into ‘expectations of’, and these latter are infinitely expandable and burdensome. When they are ultimately (and inevitably) not met, one’s market-value plummets and one becomes subject to quite rational (and even expected) downsizing, restructuring, or is simply fired. Ho's case studies and vignettes are remarkably familiar to anyone who has experienced this realm of expectations.

This is the unavoidable consequence of value as expectation, as continuously deferred improvement in one’s life circumstances. One’s home, occupation, social relations, even family are abstract investments, assets, acquired or entered into on the basis of expectations…about future expectations. It is from these expectations they derive their value, not from anything intrinsic. Consumption really is only of oneself; everything else is prospective investment. If this is materialism it is of a decidedly monastic caste. So discovers Korelitz’s Portia Nathan.

In short, what Korelitz chronicles is an untitled eschatological cult whose members are the obsessively aspirational, the achievers devoted not to what might be worthwhile, that is, authentically valuable to themselves or society, but to the techniques of achievement itself. There are two cardinal virtues promoted by the cult: Passion and Excellence. Portia Nathan promotes both vigorously (until she doesn’t, in the way of these things).

Passion is the willingness of individuals to sacrifice their lives to the immateriality of expectations. Those who want to ‘change the world’ or ‘make a difference’ are particularly drawn to the somewhat flexible ethics this virtue implies (its extreme form, of course being terrorism). Excellence is the willingness to submit to the conventional rules as prescribed by those in charge. It means being good at technique - initially those of exam-taking and interviewing; eventually those dictated in professional life, particularly those techniques involved in creating expectations.

The devotions this cult engages in appear nonsensical, superstitious, even morbidly self-destructive to those not part of it. But, and in this the populists in North America and Europe have a point, it is this cult which rules, governs and manages our society. Perhaps the recent political upheavals will provoke a recognition of this cult, a social admission of its existence and influence.

Then again perhaps not. Cults tend to persist in times of confusion that they themselves create.

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