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A review by daniell
Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever by Walter Kirn
3.0
Walter Kirn grew up in a small town in northern Minnesota and hated it. The book begins with him and his Junior classmates in a van on a Saturday morning, all of them travelling to a larger city where the SAT is administered. Kirn scored high, because demonstrating aptitude is a thing for which he has always had aptitude. Aptitude for aptitude’s sake. A man about nothing? This is essentially his conclusion, namely that merit does not guarantee substance and achievement is not the soul’s smithy.
This is a twenty-five-years-later look at what the time between the end of high school and the end of college meant for a successful student who studied at Macalester, Princeton, and then studied abroad after finishing college. He scored so well on the SAT that Macalester said he could matriculate after the end of his Junior year, and of the twenty students accepted into Princeton as transfers in 1980 Kirn was one. The verity of events written about so long after they happened is always suspect, but this account does not breech reasonable credulity. His previous works are novels and at times the dialogue seems contrived like he pulled it from somewhere dark and sphincter-y, but it stays fun anyway given that not much is at stake.
This book stays interesting at the expense of being short and leaving one wanting more by its end—a good mixture of anecdote and arc, recollection and reflection. The general idea presented is that one can do all kinds of things simply by acting them. One does not have to think to recapitulate the literary theory being taught, and as long as one is an apt recapitulator then one can, in Kirn’s case, earn a kind of meaningless respect.
The demonstration of aptitude and the winning of merit points are not all he reflects on over the course of this account. Kirn satisfyingly details how faking it just wasn’t enough towards the end, when he flies back to Minneapolis for the the selection of the two Rhodes scholars who will represent Minnesota, how he felt out of place, how his interview bombed, and how at the end he was okay with the result. Coming of age is often coming to grips with the idea that potential is never unlimited, and that limits are not bad things. By this point Kirn had come to realize that he was not on the same level as the great thinkers and model students of America, and that, while being a bs-er is not always a great thing, it’s not always a bad thing either. After his Rhodes rejection he is told of another less-prestigious scholarship called the Keasbey, described by Kirn as an award that considers the applicant’s brio and panache in addition to their capacity for scholarship. Kirn wins this, and went on to write magazine articles, novels, and he now lives in Montana—not a bad result to an early life filled with pretension and unfulfilling excellence.
This is a book about finding one’s way in the midst of wealthy people, drugs, dysfunctional relationships, Mormonism, people-pleasing, inner rings, high academics, financial limitations, crazy parents, parental uncles, stoners, the granola, hot exchange students and hicks. At the end of the thesis and antithesis we get a Walter, who is neither a perfect synthesis of nor unaffected by all of his experiences. Aren’t we all?
This is a twenty-five-years-later look at what the time between the end of high school and the end of college meant for a successful student who studied at Macalester, Princeton, and then studied abroad after finishing college. He scored so well on the SAT that Macalester said he could matriculate after the end of his Junior year, and of the twenty students accepted into Princeton as transfers in 1980 Kirn was one. The verity of events written about so long after they happened is always suspect, but this account does not breech reasonable credulity. His previous works are novels and at times the dialogue seems contrived like he pulled it from somewhere dark and sphincter-y, but it stays fun anyway given that not much is at stake.
This book stays interesting at the expense of being short and leaving one wanting more by its end—a good mixture of anecdote and arc, recollection and reflection. The general idea presented is that one can do all kinds of things simply by acting them. One does not have to think to recapitulate the literary theory being taught, and as long as one is an apt recapitulator then one can, in Kirn’s case, earn a kind of meaningless respect.
The demonstration of aptitude and the winning of merit points are not all he reflects on over the course of this account. Kirn satisfyingly details how faking it just wasn’t enough towards the end, when he flies back to Minneapolis for the the selection of the two Rhodes scholars who will represent Minnesota, how he felt out of place, how his interview bombed, and how at the end he was okay with the result. Coming of age is often coming to grips with the idea that potential is never unlimited, and that limits are not bad things. By this point Kirn had come to realize that he was not on the same level as the great thinkers and model students of America, and that, while being a bs-er is not always a great thing, it’s not always a bad thing either. After his Rhodes rejection he is told of another less-prestigious scholarship called the Keasbey, described by Kirn as an award that considers the applicant’s brio and panache in addition to their capacity for scholarship. Kirn wins this, and went on to write magazine articles, novels, and he now lives in Montana—not a bad result to an early life filled with pretension and unfulfilling excellence.
This is a book about finding one’s way in the midst of wealthy people, drugs, dysfunctional relationships, Mormonism, people-pleasing, inner rings, high academics, financial limitations, crazy parents, parental uncles, stoners, the granola, hot exchange students and hicks. At the end of the thesis and antithesis we get a Walter, who is neither a perfect synthesis of nor unaffected by all of his experiences. Aren’t we all?