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Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever
Percentile is destiny in America.
So says Walter Kirn, a peerless observer and interpreter of American life, in this whip-smart memoir of his own long strange trip through American education. Working his way up the ladder of standardized tests, extracurricular activities, and class rankings, Kirn launched himself eastward from his rural Minnesota hometown to the ivy-covered campus of Princeton University. There he found himself not in a temple of higher learning so much as an arena for gamesmanship, snobbery, social climbing, ass-kissing, and recreational drug use, where the point of literature classes was to mirror the instructor's critical theories and actual reading of the books under consideration was optional. Just on the other side of the bell curve's leading edge loomed a complete psychic collapse.
LOST IN THE MERITOCRACY reckons up the costs of a system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back”or within. It's a remarkable book that suggests the first step toward intellectual fulfillment is getting off the treadmill that is the American meritocracy. Every American who has spent years of his or her life there will experience many shocks of recognition while reading Walter Kirn's sharp, rueful, and often funny book”and likely a sense of liberation at its end.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
41 people are currently reading
1425 people want to read
About the author
Walter Kirn
39 books230 followersWalter Kirn is a regular reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, and his work appears in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Time, New York, GQ and Esquire. He is the author of six previous works of fiction: My Hard Bargain: Stories, She Needed Me, Thumbsucker, Up in the Air, Mission to America and The Unbinding. Kirn is a graduate of Princeton University and attended Oxford on a scholarship from the Keasby Foundation. "
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April 4, 2011
I first heard of this book when I saw it referenced tangentially in a recent Jonathan Alter column. I expected it to be a relatively serious (i.e. “scholarly”) work of non-fiction, but it turned out to be a breezy light-hearted memoir from a 40-something novelist about his trip through the American education system and how he worked his way up the ladder of standardized tests, extracurricular activities, and class rankings.
From rural Minnesota where his father moved the family when he was a small child in order to live out some sort of deluded fantasy of simple pastoral farm life, the author, Walter Kirn, invokes The Great Gatsby early and often throughout his narrative. In the opening pages he explains his youthful ambition by describing how he had graduated from high school a year early and attended a small St. Paul college in order to successfully transfer to Princeton the following year. In this brief passage the reader gets a good glimpse of Kirn’s style, tone, and point of the book. It is a self-effacing account of Kirn’s educational experience that demonstrates how a seemingly bright and over-achieving student learned virtually no academic knowledge in a system rigged in favor of the uber-rich and highly connected. He writes, “In imitation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Minnesota’s most famous writer and author of The Great Gatsby, the only serious work of literature that I managed to finish as a teenager, I wanted to go East.” He later writes that the tragic and cautionary message of Gatsby was lost on him; he read it merely as a “chronicle of several high-spirited Midwesterners storming through the mansions of the East.”
So how did Kirn get to Princeton with only a modicum of academic content knowledge? Through memorization and mimicry. There are several instances in the book where the author describes how he would read and memorize dictionaries and thesauruses, so that he could master the analogies section of the SAT, and so that he could impress teachers with a deep vocabulary in order to hide his lack of knowledge and intellectual creativity. Kirn writes: “A natural-born child of the meritocracy, I’d been amassing momentum my whole life, entering spelling bees, vying for forensics medals, running my mouth in mock United Nations, and I knew only one direction: forward. I lived for prizes, plaques, citations, stars, and I gave no thought to any goal beyond my next appearance on the honor roll. Learning was secondary, promotion was primary. No one ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient.”
In high school Kirn was able to accumulate those points mostly through the sheer weight of his vocabulary and a set of memorized facts from almanacs. But he also rose through the ranks in k-12 through a technique that would take different forms: pleasing the teachers. For his earliest teachers this took the form of “thoughtful” gestures of helpfulness like offering to help clean and tidy the classroom. But later he realized that pleasing teachers takes other forms as well. In 5th grade Kirn gave a compliment during a private conversation with a hippie music teacher he admired and had a crush on. From this conversation Kirn “learned something important – not about music, about teachers. They were people. Lonely people, often, who weren’t really free to share their lives with us but longed for appreciation, just as I did. And why not give it to them now and then? Maybe they would give it back to me.”
At Princeton, this “pleasing of teachers” took the form of mimicry, borrowing, and feigning knowledge and support for the latest academic and intellectual fads. In one of the more humorous moments of the book Kirn describes how he became one of the leading “decostructionalists” in the English Department’s undergraduate honors program. He assumed the courses would be “a study of the classics and analyses of the major themes and such”. Instead, he was taken aback to find that the professors regarded the classics as trivial and “beneath discussion.” Kirn continues, “We were buffeted by ‘theory’, whatever that was… What mattered, we were given to understand, were our ‘critical assumptions’.”
Kirn claims he didn’t understand the use of “theory” to interrogate his “critical assumptions”, but that he would survive by pleasing his professors by relying on skills he had acquired on the high school speech team, skills that relied on “mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as if they were conclusions I had reached myself.” Kirn then writes a passage that might give pause to anyone who is concerned with real education in America, to anyone who is worried that our education system is actually built around teaching kids the correct answers instead of teaching them to ask the right questions: “To me, imitation and education were words for the same thing. What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?”
I found Kirn’s description of how he negotiated his way through being a “deconstructionist of literature that I never constructed in the first place” to be quiet humorous; it’s worth quoting at length: “The deployment of key words was crucial, just as recognition of them had been on the SAT. Because I despaired of ever grasping these theory words, style and presentation was everything. ‘Liminal’, spoken breezily enough, and ‘valuational’, served up with verve, could make a professor shiver and drop his chalk, but if delivered hesitantly, they bombed. Unless they were spit out promptly and with spirit, such words could actually choke a person. This suffocating sensation often came over me whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism, a collection of essays of theory people that I spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest essay into an A-plus tour de force. Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution of Jaques Derrida: ‘He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.’ On the same page I encountered the windpipe-blocking ‘heternomous’ and ‘invagination.’ When I turned the page I came across – stuck in a footnote – the word ‘unreadibility.’ That word I understood, of course. But real understanding was rare with theory.”
For Kirn, he simply understood all these hard theory words to be just that: “hard.” As I reflect on my own time as a graduate student, Kirn’s summation in this passage resonated with me. “I wasn’t one of theory’s true believers,” Kirn continues, “I was a confused opportunist trying to turn confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.” I suspect that is how graduate students become indoctrinated into the orthodoxy of the academy.
Kirn’s description of his time at Princeton is almost depressing with its over-the-top self-effacing and sardonic tone. Kirn seems pathetic as he struggles to fit in and is put-off by the rigid social order. Additionally, he finds many of his classmates to be frauds while at the same time recognizing internally that he is the biggest fraud on campus. At times, he sounds like a 1980s version of Holden Caufield with a drug and alcohol problem. Halfway through his sophomore year Kirn destroys the property of his rich dorm mates for justice against their snobby treatment of him. By his senior year, Kirn is penniless, virtually friendless, and experiences a nervous breakdown.
Despite all his travails, Kirn manages to become a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship. It is in the final 25 pages where he describes his Rhodes interviews and his final days at Princeton that I had several laugh-out-loud moments. For instance, Kirn recognizes it is absurd to think he is “Rhodes material”, especially compared to his classmates who had applied. Kirn explains that they all had a “conspicuous campus presence, top athletes and leaders of student government, whereas I was an addled loner in an old raincoat … I was also an unindicted vandal, a suspected offender against the Honor Code, a phony theory devotee, and a chain-smoking post-aphasic whose only bulwark against regression was a heavily underlined thesaurus. Still, I felt I had an outside shot. I’d learned by then that the masters of advancement use a rough quota system in their work, reserving a certain number of wild-card slots for overreaching oddballs.”
Of course, Kirn does not get the Rhodes Scholarship, but the subsequent climax is a nice exclamation point on the whole book, which suggests that the first step toward intellectual fulfillment has nothing to do with the fast-paced and highly competitive educational system we have. Kirn tells us that “percentile is destiny in America”, and David Labaree, the educational historian, demonstrates this axiom in his book How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning. After all, Labaree points out and Kirn’s experience supports, our American system does not reward real knowledge or creativity; it rewards those who play the game and see their grade-point-averages as a means to a credential that can be used on the open market.
From rural Minnesota where his father moved the family when he was a small child in order to live out some sort of deluded fantasy of simple pastoral farm life, the author, Walter Kirn, invokes The Great Gatsby early and often throughout his narrative. In the opening pages he explains his youthful ambition by describing how he had graduated from high school a year early and attended a small St. Paul college in order to successfully transfer to Princeton the following year. In this brief passage the reader gets a good glimpse of Kirn’s style, tone, and point of the book. It is a self-effacing account of Kirn’s educational experience that demonstrates how a seemingly bright and over-achieving student learned virtually no academic knowledge in a system rigged in favor of the uber-rich and highly connected. He writes, “In imitation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Minnesota’s most famous writer and author of The Great Gatsby, the only serious work of literature that I managed to finish as a teenager, I wanted to go East.” He later writes that the tragic and cautionary message of Gatsby was lost on him; he read it merely as a “chronicle of several high-spirited Midwesterners storming through the mansions of the East.”
So how did Kirn get to Princeton with only a modicum of academic content knowledge? Through memorization and mimicry. There are several instances in the book where the author describes how he would read and memorize dictionaries and thesauruses, so that he could master the analogies section of the SAT, and so that he could impress teachers with a deep vocabulary in order to hide his lack of knowledge and intellectual creativity. Kirn writes: “A natural-born child of the meritocracy, I’d been amassing momentum my whole life, entering spelling bees, vying for forensics medals, running my mouth in mock United Nations, and I knew only one direction: forward. I lived for prizes, plaques, citations, stars, and I gave no thought to any goal beyond my next appearance on the honor roll. Learning was secondary, promotion was primary. No one ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient.”
In high school Kirn was able to accumulate those points mostly through the sheer weight of his vocabulary and a set of memorized facts from almanacs. But he also rose through the ranks in k-12 through a technique that would take different forms: pleasing the teachers. For his earliest teachers this took the form of “thoughtful” gestures of helpfulness like offering to help clean and tidy the classroom. But later he realized that pleasing teachers takes other forms as well. In 5th grade Kirn gave a compliment during a private conversation with a hippie music teacher he admired and had a crush on. From this conversation Kirn “learned something important – not about music, about teachers. They were people. Lonely people, often, who weren’t really free to share their lives with us but longed for appreciation, just as I did. And why not give it to them now and then? Maybe they would give it back to me.”
At Princeton, this “pleasing of teachers” took the form of mimicry, borrowing, and feigning knowledge and support for the latest academic and intellectual fads. In one of the more humorous moments of the book Kirn describes how he became one of the leading “decostructionalists” in the English Department’s undergraduate honors program. He assumed the courses would be “a study of the classics and analyses of the major themes and such”. Instead, he was taken aback to find that the professors regarded the classics as trivial and “beneath discussion.” Kirn continues, “We were buffeted by ‘theory’, whatever that was… What mattered, we were given to understand, were our ‘critical assumptions’.”
Kirn claims he didn’t understand the use of “theory” to interrogate his “critical assumptions”, but that he would survive by pleasing his professors by relying on skills he had acquired on the high school speech team, skills that relied on “mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as if they were conclusions I had reached myself.” Kirn then writes a passage that might give pause to anyone who is concerned with real education in America, to anyone who is worried that our education system is actually built around teaching kids the correct answers instead of teaching them to ask the right questions: “To me, imitation and education were words for the same thing. What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?”
I found Kirn’s description of how he negotiated his way through being a “deconstructionist of literature that I never constructed in the first place” to be quiet humorous; it’s worth quoting at length: “The deployment of key words was crucial, just as recognition of them had been on the SAT. Because I despaired of ever grasping these theory words, style and presentation was everything. ‘Liminal’, spoken breezily enough, and ‘valuational’, served up with verve, could make a professor shiver and drop his chalk, but if delivered hesitantly, they bombed. Unless they were spit out promptly and with spirit, such words could actually choke a person. This suffocating sensation often came over me whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism, a collection of essays of theory people that I spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest essay into an A-plus tour de force. Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution of Jaques Derrida: ‘He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.’ On the same page I encountered the windpipe-blocking ‘heternomous’ and ‘invagination.’ When I turned the page I came across – stuck in a footnote – the word ‘unreadibility.’ That word I understood, of course. But real understanding was rare with theory.”
For Kirn, he simply understood all these hard theory words to be just that: “hard.” As I reflect on my own time as a graduate student, Kirn’s summation in this passage resonated with me. “I wasn’t one of theory’s true believers,” Kirn continues, “I was a confused opportunist trying to turn confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.” I suspect that is how graduate students become indoctrinated into the orthodoxy of the academy.
Kirn’s description of his time at Princeton is almost depressing with its over-the-top self-effacing and sardonic tone. Kirn seems pathetic as he struggles to fit in and is put-off by the rigid social order. Additionally, he finds many of his classmates to be frauds while at the same time recognizing internally that he is the biggest fraud on campus. At times, he sounds like a 1980s version of Holden Caufield with a drug and alcohol problem. Halfway through his sophomore year Kirn destroys the property of his rich dorm mates for justice against their snobby treatment of him. By his senior year, Kirn is penniless, virtually friendless, and experiences a nervous breakdown.
Despite all his travails, Kirn manages to become a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship. It is in the final 25 pages where he describes his Rhodes interviews and his final days at Princeton that I had several laugh-out-loud moments. For instance, Kirn recognizes it is absurd to think he is “Rhodes material”, especially compared to his classmates who had applied. Kirn explains that they all had a “conspicuous campus presence, top athletes and leaders of student government, whereas I was an addled loner in an old raincoat … I was also an unindicted vandal, a suspected offender against the Honor Code, a phony theory devotee, and a chain-smoking post-aphasic whose only bulwark against regression was a heavily underlined thesaurus. Still, I felt I had an outside shot. I’d learned by then that the masters of advancement use a rough quota system in their work, reserving a certain number of wild-card slots for overreaching oddballs.”
Of course, Kirn does not get the Rhodes Scholarship, but the subsequent climax is a nice exclamation point on the whole book, which suggests that the first step toward intellectual fulfillment has nothing to do with the fast-paced and highly competitive educational system we have. Kirn tells us that “percentile is destiny in America”, and David Labaree, the educational historian, demonstrates this axiom in his book How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning. After all, Labaree points out and Kirn’s experience supports, our American system does not reward real knowledge or creativity; it rewards those who play the game and see their grade-point-averages as a means to a credential that can be used on the open market.
December 4, 2016
Superb. It is common for reviewers to say that this chapter or that was worth the price of some book or other, but this book, full of brutal honesty about academic posturing, has multiple metaphors that were worth the price of the book. Man, can Walter Kirn write.
April 14, 2015
I have not read any of Walter Kirn's novels, including the one made into a Clooney movie (Up In The Air), but this rather bleak memoir might persuade me to do so because of how well-written it is.
Growing up in a small town in the Midwest with an eccentric father and self-educated mother, Walter Kirn was always one of the bright boys in his small school district. More importantly, he learned early on that education was about one thing: being applauded, winning prizes, and doing what you needed to do to get good grades and high scores.
That becomes his ticket into Princeton University. It also becomes his ruination. At Princeton, he is not only completely out of his element socially -- one whole section of the book relates the outrageous period when his wealthy roommates redecorated their living room and expected him to pay a share of the cost without having consulted him first; when he couldn't, he was not allowed to set foot in the common area -- but he was no longer the top student, and his continuing tactic of trying to butter up professors, learn what he needed to get by and parrot back whatever others were saying not only makes his education hollow and shallow, but gives him such despair that he ends up late in his undergraduate years becoming aphasic for a while -- literally unable to remember the words for common objects, in what seems to be a severe stress reaction.
Walter Kirn, in his own recounting, is not a very likable or admirable young man, but I think that is exactly the point he is trying to make. In the end, the book ends on a note of hope, when Kirn discovers after his diploma and before beginning a fellowship that learning, miraculously, can be enjoyed for its own sake.
A slim, pungent, disturbing and rewarding memoir.
Growing up in a small town in the Midwest with an eccentric father and self-educated mother, Walter Kirn was always one of the bright boys in his small school district. More importantly, he learned early on that education was about one thing: being applauded, winning prizes, and doing what you needed to do to get good grades and high scores.
That becomes his ticket into Princeton University. It also becomes his ruination. At Princeton, he is not only completely out of his element socially -- one whole section of the book relates the outrageous period when his wealthy roommates redecorated their living room and expected him to pay a share of the cost without having consulted him first; when he couldn't, he was not allowed to set foot in the common area -- but he was no longer the top student, and his continuing tactic of trying to butter up professors, learn what he needed to get by and parrot back whatever others were saying not only makes his education hollow and shallow, but gives him such despair that he ends up late in his undergraduate years becoming aphasic for a while -- literally unable to remember the words for common objects, in what seems to be a severe stress reaction.
Walter Kirn, in his own recounting, is not a very likable or admirable young man, but I think that is exactly the point he is trying to make. In the end, the book ends on a note of hope, when Kirn discovers after his diploma and before beginning a fellowship that learning, miraculously, can be enjoyed for its own sake.
A slim, pungent, disturbing and rewarding memoir.
August 15, 2009
Was it back the 1960s when you could get into a prestigious university with a so-so high school record and high SAT scores, and then bluff, drug, and sex your way successfully through the next four years and into a British postgraduate fellowship by relying on raw intelligence coupled with the ability to parrot back to professors just what they want to hear? Well, not exactly, since universities in the '60s still gave out a lot of Cs for average work. Fast-forward to the 1980s, however, and the scenario becomes reality if Walter Kirn's memoir is to be believed. Master the jargon of postmodernism, and you're home free as an English major at Princeton. (Kirn's story gains some plausibility in light of the infamous Alan Sokal hoax).
Kirn is a fairly engaging writer, and he spins out some good scenes, but his drug stuff doesn't trump Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, and his orgiastic college material doesn't trump Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons. Moreover, it's difficult to figure out Kirn's take on himself. He's obviously belittling the establishment for tolerating his (former?) ilk, but it's not clear whether his meta-self finds his collegiate self to be clever or reprehensible. Kirn's long-overdue flash of academic enlightenment on the book's final page doesn't exactly add up to redemption. More telling is his adulatory barroom encounter in Chapter 7 with a Princeton faculty member ("Julian"*) who "taught psychology . . . despite having no diploma in the subject, only a book he'd written as an amateur". Ironically, Kirn manages to mock academic pretension while at the same time celebrating charlatans. Unfortunately, he fails to acknowledge that every clever impostor who makes it into the mainstream displaces someone earnest and talented who doesn't.
If you have time on your hands, Kirn is a quick read, but for a much more compelling loser-to-success perspective (minus the cynicism about those who succeed) I recommend the works of Tobias Wolff.
----------------------------------------
*Although unidentified by Kirn, the individual in question is surely Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Kirn is a fairly engaging writer, and he spins out some good scenes, but his drug stuff doesn't trump Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, and his orgiastic college material doesn't trump Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons. Moreover, it's difficult to figure out Kirn's take on himself. He's obviously belittling the establishment for tolerating his (former?) ilk, but it's not clear whether his meta-self finds his collegiate self to be clever or reprehensible. Kirn's long-overdue flash of academic enlightenment on the book's final page doesn't exactly add up to redemption. More telling is his adulatory barroom encounter in Chapter 7 with a Princeton faculty member ("Julian"*) who "taught psychology . . . despite having no diploma in the subject, only a book he'd written as an amateur". Ironically, Kirn manages to mock academic pretension while at the same time celebrating charlatans. Unfortunately, he fails to acknowledge that every clever impostor who makes it into the mainstream displaces someone earnest and talented who doesn't.
If you have time on your hands, Kirn is a quick read, but for a much more compelling loser-to-success perspective (minus the cynicism about those who succeed) I recommend the works of Tobias Wolff.
----------------------------------------
*Although unidentified by Kirn, the individual in question is surely Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
March 11, 2025
Kirn crafts himself into someone I disliked until the end. He brags about his ‘exploits’ while playing victim like he doesn’t hold a silver spoon. It isn’t until the end where he begins to slightly redeem himself. Still, who he portrays himself to be along the way is someone that I can’t relate to, nor do I want to. Everything goes his way, yet he complains the whole time as if it doesn’t. Acting as if some invisible force prevents him from becoming who he is supposed to be.
Has some interesting stories, some that I liked too, but overall this memoir is fine. If the ending weren’t portraying himself in a better light I might have been harsher, but he seemed to sort of get it in the end.
Has some interesting stories, some that I liked too, but overall this memoir is fine. If the ending weren’t portraying himself in a better light I might have been harsher, but he seemed to sort of get it in the end.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 29, 2010
Interesting theme of his "aptitude" for standardized test-taking propelling him up a ladder of competition at the expense of any questioning/reflection about where the ladder was leading and whether it was somewhere he wanted to go.
Much of the focus is on his time as an English major and theater/arts-scene hanger-on at Princeton.
Some of the enjoyment I got from the book was a matter of shared experience ("hey, my grade school had those 'SRA' color-coded cards too, and the competitive kids would make races out of being the first to get to a certain level" "I knew snobs like that in college also!" "I met someone once who was obsessed with the book by that guy he just described meeting in a bar; cool!"), but a lot of it I think was that he's just a very good, funny writer. Able to take commonplace observations (it's easier to BS your way through a discussion of English Literature than in Calculus or Chemistry; undergraduates form recognizable social clusters; drugs aren't good for your emotional stability......) and bring them to life via the characters (people, I guess, but I would not be surprised if some of the stories are embellished, so I thought of them as characters) he encounters.
Much of the focus is on his time as an English major and theater/arts-scene hanger-on at Princeton.
Some of the enjoyment I got from the book was a matter of shared experience ("hey, my grade school had those 'SRA' color-coded cards too, and the competitive kids would make races out of being the first to get to a certain level" "I knew snobs like that in college also!" "I met someone once who was obsessed with the book by that guy he just described meeting in a bar; cool!"), but a lot of it I think was that he's just a very good, funny writer. Able to take commonplace observations (it's easier to BS your way through a discussion of English Literature than in Calculus or Chemistry; undergraduates form recognizable social clusters; drugs aren't good for your emotional stability......) and bring them to life via the characters (people, I guess, but I would not be surprised if some of the stories are embellished, so I thought of them as characters) he encounters.
April 23, 2010
Kirn taught at UChicago for a quarter, so I was interested to read his latest book about his underwhelming education (or non-education) both before and at Princeton. Unfortunately, Kirn's writing is also underwhelming. While some of his reflections about education are interesting, and dead-on (Kirn observes that all he had to do to get an A in an English class at college was to insert words he and most people didn't understand), in the end, his writing suffers from the same problems he suffered throughout college: all sheer wit, no real depth or skill. Kirn writes that he managed to get into Princeton through cleverness and no work, and that he then proceeded to spend his years there posing as an intellectual, envying those who had more money, and doing drugs, eventually culminating in a psychological breakdown that left him aphasic. He then slowly builds his mind back up by reading the dictionary, which I think is reflected in his writing. Nevertheless, no one can argue that Kirn isn't clever, and while I don't think there was anything particularly special about this book, it was a decent and quick read.
March 6, 2017
I did not expect a turn toward addiction memoir leading up to a nervous breakdown. I loved the ending, contra firehose of knowledge or academic gamesmanship. Really enjoyable.
December 1, 2012
Although I’ve never read an article or book by the author previously, I know why "Lost in the Meritocracy" is in my TBR list. Someone whose taste in and judgment of literature I respect added it and after glancing at the synopsis I did, also.
It is clear that Walter Kirn is an excellent writer. He is articulate, literate, and can form a decent narrative. Although I understand that many people read and analyze this book to seek deeper insight into the American Education System, American Class Boundaries and the nature of Elitism and the Elite themselves, I did not. I read it for the usual reason: did the writer create something that held my interest.
The short answer is “yes”. His “memoirs” of growing up and moving through schools and into collegiate life are a good story. Maybe not what one would consider attention-grabbing fiction, but then this is not fiction. In this slim volume, the author exposes those incidents that he uses to illustrate his thesis: it is not an encyclopedic history of his life.
The longer answer is “sort of”. Even though I said that I read it for “reading” I also ran my own, semi-conscious analysis of his actions and achievements. Mr. Kirn is someone who everyone agreed had “high potential” from his early years on. Did he live up to that potential? If his life ended before the last two chapters, one would have to say “no”. If you include those, then it becomes more of a “maybe, maybe not”. (I am basing this solely on what is presented in this book. I still do not know anything more about the man.)
His “epiphany”, if you will, comes just before he will be heading off to Oxford University. Has he risen above the hollow sham of his “formative” and college (i.e. Princeton) days or is it something else? That’s an area where one could take almost any position. I have my interpretation, you have yours.
Did exposure to his “betters” (i.e. those who are the natural attendees of an Ivy League school) make the author a better man, a better writer? (I mean in the long-term sense, not while he was there.) Probably not. From his own words it was his Pakistani friend that provide him with the most intellectual stimulation of his last 2 years there (even though he himself was still spouting, his friend was seriously engaged in these topics and discussions.) But it did give him the realization that there was nothing beyond for him, unless he created it himself. What does a grifter do when everyone is an honest man? When the games run out, wither the “gamer”?
There’s a lot that is right and wrong about the American Educational System. There have been people clever enough to fool others since time began. Many people have “high potential” but for one reason or another never live up to that promise. Mr. Kirn is not alone even in his apparent recovery to prominence. While I did not have any preconceived notions when I began this book, I probably would not recommend it to some one who only wants to use it for social and political material. On the other hand, it was well-written enough that I am tempted to read more by the author. I think his fiction will be up in the 95th percentile. Three (3) solid stars.
It is clear that Walter Kirn is an excellent writer. He is articulate, literate, and can form a decent narrative. Although I understand that many people read and analyze this book to seek deeper insight into the American Education System, American Class Boundaries and the nature of Elitism and the Elite themselves, I did not. I read it for the usual reason: did the writer create something that held my interest.
The short answer is “yes”. His “memoirs” of growing up and moving through schools and into collegiate life are a good story. Maybe not what one would consider attention-grabbing fiction, but then this is not fiction. In this slim volume, the author exposes those incidents that he uses to illustrate his thesis: it is not an encyclopedic history of his life.
The longer answer is “sort of”. Even though I said that I read it for “reading” I also ran my own, semi-conscious analysis of his actions and achievements. Mr. Kirn is someone who everyone agreed had “high potential” from his early years on. Did he live up to that potential? If his life ended before the last two chapters, one would have to say “no”. If you include those, then it becomes more of a “maybe, maybe not”. (I am basing this solely on what is presented in this book. I still do not know anything more about the man.)
His “epiphany”, if you will, comes just before he will be heading off to Oxford University. Has he risen above the hollow sham of his “formative” and college (i.e. Princeton) days or is it something else? That’s an area where one could take almost any position. I have my interpretation, you have yours.
Did exposure to his “betters” (i.e. those who are the natural attendees of an Ivy League school) make the author a better man, a better writer? (I mean in the long-term sense, not while he was there.) Probably not. From his own words it was his Pakistani friend that provide him with the most intellectual stimulation of his last 2 years there (even though he himself was still spouting, his friend was seriously engaged in these topics and discussions.) But it did give him the realization that there was nothing beyond for him, unless he created it himself. What does a grifter do when everyone is an honest man? When the games run out, wither the “gamer”?
There’s a lot that is right and wrong about the American Educational System. There have been people clever enough to fool others since time began. Many people have “high potential” but for one reason or another never live up to that promise. Mr. Kirn is not alone even in his apparent recovery to prominence. While I did not have any preconceived notions when I began this book, I probably would not recommend it to some one who only wants to use it for social and political material. On the other hand, it was well-written enough that I am tempted to read more by the author. I think his fiction will be up in the 95th percentile. Three (3) solid stars.
May 7, 2012
I borrowed this for some light reading on a plane from a fellow Goodreader. This is probably more of a 3.5 star review. I would say I liked this piece and recommend it.
This is one of those cover designs/titles that, I thought, suggested a much different kind of book within than what I encountered. This is a memoir, and although it is concerned intimately with the highest echelons of education in this country, it is much less about meritocracy than the title would have you believe. Even so, the first two or four chapters are uncomfortably familiar for me. The author reflects on being the kind of elementary school student who wanted to be the one teachers called on when a correct answer was needed. He talks about the pressure to win spelling bees (I remember both those and science fairs) and to focus on standardized testing.
This is by no means a comprehensive evaluation of the pressure many students face. Moreover, once the story really gets going, I think it's more an indictment of college than it is of meritocracy. The author never manages to figure out what he wants to do while he's in school. He poses as a playwright and as a proponent of Critical Theory. There is an uncomfortable truth in the way he talks about using a certain kind of vocabulary to fool people into buying your take in a Theory environment.
I'm not insensible about this--remember that hoax at the DU Press with Stan Fish? Still, it's as if the author is laughing at us even from his "reformed" place later in life. He still doesn't think academia is worth much. He never seemed to really like books, or reading, or figuring out why we like them. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the story is that, after four years of middling academic involvement, incredible drug use, and a near-total failure to make any lasting connections to other human beings, the author closes, triumphally, by applying for a fellowship that takes him to Oxford. A fellowship for ne'erdowells with a wine budget.
Maybe I'm most troubled by the fact that the author seems to want to be contrite, but ultimately leaves us feeling like he beat the system. I don't know, exactly. It's generally well-written.
This is one of those cover designs/titles that, I thought, suggested a much different kind of book within than what I encountered. This is a memoir, and although it is concerned intimately with the highest echelons of education in this country, it is much less about meritocracy than the title would have you believe. Even so, the first two or four chapters are uncomfortably familiar for me. The author reflects on being the kind of elementary school student who wanted to be the one teachers called on when a correct answer was needed. He talks about the pressure to win spelling bees (I remember both those and science fairs) and to focus on standardized testing.
This is by no means a comprehensive evaluation of the pressure many students face. Moreover, once the story really gets going, I think it's more an indictment of college than it is of meritocracy. The author never manages to figure out what he wants to do while he's in school. He poses as a playwright and as a proponent of Critical Theory. There is an uncomfortable truth in the way he talks about using a certain kind of vocabulary to fool people into buying your take in a Theory environment.
I'm not insensible about this--remember that hoax at the DU Press with Stan Fish? Still, it's as if the author is laughing at us even from his "reformed" place later in life. He still doesn't think academia is worth much. He never seemed to really like books, or reading, or figuring out why we like them. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the story is that, after four years of middling academic involvement, incredible drug use, and a near-total failure to make any lasting connections to other human beings, the author closes, triumphally, by applying for a fellowship that takes him to Oxford. A fellowship for ne'erdowells with a wine budget.
Maybe I'm most troubled by the fact that the author seems to want to be contrite, but ultimately leaves us feeling like he beat the system. I don't know, exactly. It's generally well-written.
September 26, 2014
Kirn on his efforts to get a Presidential Certificate of Fitness in PhyEd class:
"I'd already disappointed the President in two less-strenuous events - chin-ups and the standing broad jump- and another defeat, I feared, would crush me utterly and show me up as a poor citizen. It would prove that I wasn't just weak, but flawed, defective, and likely to prove a burden on my country should it ever be put to some great test such as resisting a foreign invasion."
An exchange student at his high school: "I don't remember her country of origin. It was one of those small, frigid nations that at the time was partly subjugated by the Russians but would eventually break free and dominate the worldwide modeling scene"
"The benefits of a Princeton degree were so far-reaching and long-lasting, supposedly, that for the duration of our lives we would be expected to give money to various university funds and causes, all of which were portrayed as critical to carrying out what was called the place's "mission." I'd assumed that a deal was a deal when Princeton admitted me, but I was mistaken, it turned out. The price of getting in- to the university itself, and to the presumed wonderland it led to - would be an endless dunning for nebulous services that weren't included in the prospectus."
I vowed to get serious about my studies. I chose to major in English, since it sounded like something I might already know.
The Woodrow Wilson school: "The edifice, whose design was so replete with futuristic optimism that it already seemed comically defunct, faced a plaza with a broad reflecting pool whose centerpiece was an abstract sculpture evocative of the maggot-scoured remains of a giant chicken carcass."
I learned that my friend now belonged to the Tiger Club, the ale-drenched, reactionary redoubt of Princeton's most stalwart young misogynists.
To my mind, the vaunted mission of the Rhodes smacked of a sort of science-fiction Nazism
"I'd already disappointed the President in two less-strenuous events - chin-ups and the standing broad jump- and another defeat, I feared, would crush me utterly and show me up as a poor citizen. It would prove that I wasn't just weak, but flawed, defective, and likely to prove a burden on my country should it ever be put to some great test such as resisting a foreign invasion."
An exchange student at his high school: "I don't remember her country of origin. It was one of those small, frigid nations that at the time was partly subjugated by the Russians but would eventually break free and dominate the worldwide modeling scene"
"The benefits of a Princeton degree were so far-reaching and long-lasting, supposedly, that for the duration of our lives we would be expected to give money to various university funds and causes, all of which were portrayed as critical to carrying out what was called the place's "mission." I'd assumed that a deal was a deal when Princeton admitted me, but I was mistaken, it turned out. The price of getting in- to the university itself, and to the presumed wonderland it led to - would be an endless dunning for nebulous services that weren't included in the prospectus."
I vowed to get serious about my studies. I chose to major in English, since it sounded like something I might already know.
The Woodrow Wilson school: "The edifice, whose design was so replete with futuristic optimism that it already seemed comically defunct, faced a plaza with a broad reflecting pool whose centerpiece was an abstract sculpture evocative of the maggot-scoured remains of a giant chicken carcass."
I learned that my friend now belonged to the Tiger Club, the ale-drenched, reactionary redoubt of Princeton's most stalwart young misogynists.
To my mind, the vaunted mission of the Rhodes smacked of a sort of science-fiction Nazism
October 11, 2009
This is one arrogant, conceited person. After a couple hundred pages portraying how intellectually superior he is (albeit misguided), he makes his point, concretely, on the last page. A good point, and I know he was making the point all along, but what a drag getting there.
One paragraph does stand out on page 23: "My psychiatrist, who'd encouraged these reminiscences and patiently listened ot them for several sessions, fanning my hopes for a conclusive insight into my conflicted character, ended up profoundly disappointing me. He told me my memories weren't reliable. He said they amounted to a myth . . . born, he said, of resentment toward my parents . . . he said I'd made of Uncle Admiral a fantasy figure of discipline and order that excused my failure, or unwillingness, to develop these qualities in myself or properly acknowledge them in others.
"'Fair enough,' I said. 'Sounds good. Whatever.' I knew I wouldn't be coming back to him. He'd made some good points but I sensed he made them often, to other patients besides me."
READ THIS AGAIN, ALL YOU THERAPISTS, and remember that EVERY story is unique.
One paragraph does stand out on page 23: "My psychiatrist, who'd encouraged these reminiscences and patiently listened ot them for several sessions, fanning my hopes for a conclusive insight into my conflicted character, ended up profoundly disappointing me. He told me my memories weren't reliable. He said they amounted to a myth . . . born, he said, of resentment toward my parents . . . he said I'd made of Uncle Admiral a fantasy figure of discipline and order that excused my failure, or unwillingness, to develop these qualities in myself or properly acknowledge them in others.
"'Fair enough,' I said. 'Sounds good. Whatever.' I knew I wouldn't be coming back to him. He'd made some good points but I sensed he made them often, to other patients besides me."
READ THIS AGAIN, ALL YOU THERAPISTS, and remember that EVERY story is unique.
June 14, 2009
Perhaps if I were to read the second half of this book, I might glean some insights from the story, but it just made me too mad to finish. I can't quite figure out why it makes me angry, but it does. The passage about having a three-way with two beautiful girls in high school made it seem like the experience was his just reward for graduating high school in his junior year and going to college a year early. Oh, and the SATs? A piece of fucking cake. It's easy to get into Princeton--just win a couple of spelling bees, join the debate club and you're on your way! This guy gets a chance at an education I would KILL to have, and then practically brags about how he squandered the opportunity by finding the paths of easiest resistance. Guess what you get for not learning anything in college? A Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford! Poor guy! I know I'm probably missing the point of this book, but I just can't get past his whole "the only reason I got into an Ivy League school was because I happen to be a good test-taker" front.
April 22, 2012
Three stars is probably a bit generous, but I enjoyed the very end of the memoir, where Kirn gives his final verdict on the Princeton experience, so the book gets a half-star bonus.
Outside of the last few chapters, this read like a veiled attempt for Kirn to brag about all the women he slept with and all the drugs he did when he was younger. There was nothing resembling a narrative thread, and there wasn't really any rhyme or reason for what anecdotes were included, except that he seemed to include the most salacious and to leave out anything related to actual coursework. This seemed odd to me, given what the book was supposed to be about (and also, that it was supposed to be about something).
Parts of this were fun to read, but mostly the memoir failed to hold my interest, and didn't give me much new insight into the college experience (again, the last couple chapters excepted).
Outside of the last few chapters, this read like a veiled attempt for Kirn to brag about all the women he slept with and all the drugs he did when he was younger. There was nothing resembling a narrative thread, and there wasn't really any rhyme or reason for what anecdotes were included, except that he seemed to include the most salacious and to leave out anything related to actual coursework. This seemed odd to me, given what the book was supposed to be about (and also, that it was supposed to be about something).
Parts of this were fun to read, but mostly the memoir failed to hold my interest, and didn't give me much new insight into the college experience (again, the last couple chapters excepted).
Read
August 2, 2011I thought the book would be an indictment of the system, but instead it seems to me an indictment of the author. I found it to be an engaging memoir, and a quick read. But it's not so much a coming-of-age tale as a description of how the author did NOT come of age and find himself, although his self-discovery is alluded to at the end of the book (it presumably takes place at a future point in his life not covered by this book).
Because the character (the author) doesn't really evolve much during the course of the book there's not much substance, in my opinion. But his observations about life among the high-achieving high-percentile academic elite were pithy and fun to read, so I can recommend the book if you're looking for a light read about the life of a misfit at Princeton (I think in the 1980s).
Because the character (the author) doesn't really evolve much during the course of the book there's not much substance, in my opinion. But his observations about life among the high-achieving high-percentile academic elite were pithy and fun to read, so I can recommend the book if you're looking for a light read about the life of a misfit at Princeton (I think in the 1980s).
August 1, 2009
Walter Kirn's memoir -- a must read for anyone who ever harbored aspirations of Ivy League grandeur that didn't materialize. Recently he gave a reading from this book at Tin House ending with the appeal, "Don't go to Princeton!" He was a Minnesota misfit who, via outstanding SAT scores found himself desperately seeking to find himself among crowds he defines in his book as "Those Who'd Been on Sailboats" (rich snobs), "Those Who Strove to Serve Mankind" (government-bound), "Those Who Never Raised Their Eyes" (computer geeks) and finally "Those Who Pursued Disintegration Fully" (druggies). His honesty in his search for himself is as convincing as is his theatrical exchanges with university provosts and scholarship committees.
August 15, 2010
I couldn't figure out what this book was supposed to be about, or how the structure of the book was (ostensibly) to work for the reader. Vignettes? Short stories? There was no cohesion, so that was irritating. Then the "memoir" itself was trash: Drug use at Princeton. Sex at Princeton. Vandalism at Princeton. Look how smart I am at Princeton. Cracking up at Princeton. All done in such an arrogant way that Kirn is impossible (at least for me) to like. I just didn't care about him or his story. Not recommended.
September 2, 2013
The book feels like an extension of the "con man" autobiography Kirn presents. As a Princetonian of probably the first generation of "meritocracy" applicants, I was prepared to,accept,Kirn's analysis and be sympathetic to his plight. But reading the acknowledgments to include the former dean of the college/ a future Harvard president--it is obvious that the outcast-outsider role,is just another in a long series of cons. Disappointing on many levels.
September 27, 2016
I really love Walter Kirn. This is a series of stories that serve to run a reductio on America's merit-based education system. You produce what you put in, and Kirn winsomely illustrates through his own life how this system falls short. His introduction into true education rhymed with my own personal experience which was a cherry on top. Eager to dive into more of his stuff soon.
December 29, 2009
He worked the system. Better, he knew how to work the system.
He was not particularly well educated. He faked it. He scammed his teachers. He took the right classes. He aced the SAT.
I’m not sure I really wanted to know this. Is he typical? I know I don’t want to know the answer to that.
He was not particularly well educated. He faked it. He scammed his teachers. He took the right classes. He aced the SAT.
I’m not sure I really wanted to know this. Is he typical? I know I don’t want to know the answer to that.
October 20, 2014
13 - Back then I knew where I was going, and that to get there I'd have to keep my head clear. But now I'm here, I've arrived, I've topped the hill, and my head doesn't function the way it used to. All thanks to an education and a test that measured and rewarded...what, exactly? Nothing important, I've discovered. Nothing sustaining. Just "aptitude."
That's why we're all here: we all showed aptitude. Aptitude for showing aptitude, mainly. That's what they wanted, so that's what we delivered. A talent for some things, a knack for many things, and a genius for one thing: running up the count.
Nobody told us it wouldn't be enough.
23 - Everyone needs a personal creator, real or imagined, and he was mine. He'd shown me the world and where I stood in it and how it related to the places where others stood. He'd taught me to love learning for its own sake, as a way to feel less lost. Knowledge is power, people often say--and I later succumbed to this lie myself, regrettably--but Uncle Admiral, the mapmaker, knew better. Knowledge is a reckoning, he taught me, a way to assess your location, your true position, not a strategy for improving your position.
168 - I nodded, chilled. I'd given not a single thought, I realized, to the question of what I might do once I left Princeton.
171 - Our shape-shifting, agile, approval-seeking brains may have entitled us to live and study with the children of the ruling class, but not to mate with them
This was the system's greatest flaw, and it enraged us. A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize. It can confer success but it can't grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to overthrow.
173 - It had been years since I'd known what I was talking about, and I no longer expected such conversations to be conclusive or enlightening. They were catechisms, incantations. They reminded me of a short-lived high-school class in which we'd tried to learn German phonetically by repeating sentences from tapes.
176 - These discussions allowed me to flourish arcane concepts picked up from my bull sessions with V., but if Professor R. ever caught on to the thinness of my borrowed ideas, he was careful not to show it. With him, I was the thinker I hoped to pass as, skeptical, ironic, and unconventional.
178, on his reluctance to pursue heiress to Rhodes family diamond-mining industry - And yet something kept me from pursuing her. It wasn't just my muteness. It was dread. Dread of exposure, of failure, and of collapse, but mostly dread of gaining what I sought (distinction, others' envy, the world itself) and discovering that it wasn't I who'd sought it.
188 - With graduation just a year away and no firm career plans or even career desires (my vague interests in drama and poetry didn't qualify), the only game I'd ever learned to play--scaling the American meritocratic mountain--was, I feared, about to end.
190, on going for the Rhodes - Just get int the room, and then act like you belong there while cozying up to the folks who clearly do--this had always ben my winning formula and I saw no good reason to abandon it.
To increase my chances of success, I made no contingency plans for failure. I threw myself at the mercy of the universe.
198 - I drifted through my classes the next day, and every day for the next week, astonished anew by how little four years of college had affected me. The great poems and novels mystified me still, particularly the ones I'd written papers on, and my math skills, once adequate for the SATs, had atrophied to nothing. The science classes I'd been required to take, on geology and psychology, had been graded pass-fail, and thought I'd passed them, barely, I'd already forgotten what "igneous" meant and where in the brain short-term memories were stored.
Worse, I had no prospects. All around me friends were taking positions with worldwide corporations and securing places in lofty grad schools, but I had nothing but three sheets of paper, one of them mapping the quickest route from Princeton to downtown Philadelphia, the site of my upcoming ultimate rebuff. I'd never bothered to contemplate the moment when the quest for trophies would end, as would the game of trading on previous trophies. Once I had nowhere to go but up. No I had nowhere to go at all, it seemed. The only suspense was what shape defeat would take. There he goes, the Ivy League grocery bagger. There he lies, the hobo with the diploma.
205 - They wanted a hustler. They wanted an impressionist, They wanted someone to play a man of mystery who'd caught the fancy of a fool. And soon I'd be off to Oxford as a result. "Result" was not exactly the right word, though, because it suggested that logic governs destiny. But now I knew otherwise. Imagination does. And though part of me had always suspected as much and certain teachers had coached me in the notion ("Imagine that you can be anything you want"), what I hadn't understood at all was that our imaginations don't act alone. One's own imagination is powerless until it starts dancing with another's.
Imagine having been imagined. Imagine.
I couldn't. I hadn't. Perhaps because none of my teachers since Uncle Admiral--in whose imagination I'd been born, but whom I hadn't thought about for years; too busy--had told me that such duets were even possible. No wonder I'd grown so self-pitying and isolated. And no wonder I'd hated Princeton, that dreamland that seemed to dream only about itself (and asked that the world and its students do the same). But then, in Philadelphia, at what seemed to me like the last minute and in the most outlandish fashion, I discovered the truth--if words like "truth" mean anything. And even if they don't, perhaps.
Pause in your knowing to be known. Quit pushing--let yourself be pulled. Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.
210, on differences between him and his childhood friend Karl, who had developed an interest in art and literature and thought Walt would be fun to talk to - To begin with, I couldn't quote the trascendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn't quote anyone, reliably. I'd honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain works in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some "classic" or "masterpiece," for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back it if looked like it was changing.
Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They'd gotten me through Princeton, they hadn't quite kept me from Oxford, and these I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now--not by memorizing Ralph Waldo Emerson. I'd found out a lot since I'd aced the SATs, about the system, about myself, and about the new class that the system had created, which I was not part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.
211 - My cynicism was creeping back, but later that summer something happened that changed me--not instantly but decisively...One feverish night I found myself in the living room standing before the bookcase containing my mother's classics for the masses. I'd passed right by them a thousand times, scanned their titles no more than once a year, skimmed a couple of them, finished just one (and hilariously misread it--The Great Gatsby), but that night, bored and sick, I took one down and held it tight: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Then I did something unprecedented for me: I carried it to my steamy bedroom and actually let it absorb me, page by page, chapter by chapter, straight on to the end. A few days later I repeated the feat with Great Expectations, another canonical stalwart that I'd somehow gotten through Princeton without opening. Shockingly, I already knew the story: Miss Havisham, a lunatic old woman, is thought to be the secret patron of Pip, the waifish boy who becomes a London gentleman.
And so, belatedly, haltingly, accidentally, and quite implausibly and incredibly, it began at last: my education. I wasn't sure what it would get me, whose approval it might win, or how long it might take to complete (forever, I had an inkling), but for once those weren't my first concerns. Alone in my room, congested and exhausted, I forgot my obsession with self-advancement. I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. Instead of filling in blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.
I wanted to find out what others thought.
That's why we're all here: we all showed aptitude. Aptitude for showing aptitude, mainly. That's what they wanted, so that's what we delivered. A talent for some things, a knack for many things, and a genius for one thing: running up the count.
Nobody told us it wouldn't be enough.
23 - Everyone needs a personal creator, real or imagined, and he was mine. He'd shown me the world and where I stood in it and how it related to the places where others stood. He'd taught me to love learning for its own sake, as a way to feel less lost. Knowledge is power, people often say--and I later succumbed to this lie myself, regrettably--but Uncle Admiral, the mapmaker, knew better. Knowledge is a reckoning, he taught me, a way to assess your location, your true position, not a strategy for improving your position.
168 - I nodded, chilled. I'd given not a single thought, I realized, to the question of what I might do once I left Princeton.
171 - Our shape-shifting, agile, approval-seeking brains may have entitled us to live and study with the children of the ruling class, but not to mate with them
This was the system's greatest flaw, and it enraged us. A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize. It can confer success but it can't grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to overthrow.
173 - It had been years since I'd known what I was talking about, and I no longer expected such conversations to be conclusive or enlightening. They were catechisms, incantations. They reminded me of a short-lived high-school class in which we'd tried to learn German phonetically by repeating sentences from tapes.
176 - These discussions allowed me to flourish arcane concepts picked up from my bull sessions with V., but if Professor R. ever caught on to the thinness of my borrowed ideas, he was careful not to show it. With him, I was the thinker I hoped to pass as, skeptical, ironic, and unconventional.
178, on his reluctance to pursue heiress to Rhodes family diamond-mining industry - And yet something kept me from pursuing her. It wasn't just my muteness. It was dread. Dread of exposure, of failure, and of collapse, but mostly dread of gaining what I sought (distinction, others' envy, the world itself) and discovering that it wasn't I who'd sought it.
188 - With graduation just a year away and no firm career plans or even career desires (my vague interests in drama and poetry didn't qualify), the only game I'd ever learned to play--scaling the American meritocratic mountain--was, I feared, about to end.
190, on going for the Rhodes - Just get int the room, and then act like you belong there while cozying up to the folks who clearly do--this had always ben my winning formula and I saw no good reason to abandon it.
To increase my chances of success, I made no contingency plans for failure. I threw myself at the mercy of the universe.
198 - I drifted through my classes the next day, and every day for the next week, astonished anew by how little four years of college had affected me. The great poems and novels mystified me still, particularly the ones I'd written papers on, and my math skills, once adequate for the SATs, had atrophied to nothing. The science classes I'd been required to take, on geology and psychology, had been graded pass-fail, and thought I'd passed them, barely, I'd already forgotten what "igneous" meant and where in the brain short-term memories were stored.
Worse, I had no prospects. All around me friends were taking positions with worldwide corporations and securing places in lofty grad schools, but I had nothing but three sheets of paper, one of them mapping the quickest route from Princeton to downtown Philadelphia, the site of my upcoming ultimate rebuff. I'd never bothered to contemplate the moment when the quest for trophies would end, as would the game of trading on previous trophies. Once I had nowhere to go but up. No I had nowhere to go at all, it seemed. The only suspense was what shape defeat would take. There he goes, the Ivy League grocery bagger. There he lies, the hobo with the diploma.
205 - They wanted a hustler. They wanted an impressionist, They wanted someone to play a man of mystery who'd caught the fancy of a fool. And soon I'd be off to Oxford as a result. "Result" was not exactly the right word, though, because it suggested that logic governs destiny. But now I knew otherwise. Imagination does. And though part of me had always suspected as much and certain teachers had coached me in the notion ("Imagine that you can be anything you want"), what I hadn't understood at all was that our imaginations don't act alone. One's own imagination is powerless until it starts dancing with another's.
Imagine having been imagined. Imagine.
I couldn't. I hadn't. Perhaps because none of my teachers since Uncle Admiral--in whose imagination I'd been born, but whom I hadn't thought about for years; too busy--had told me that such duets were even possible. No wonder I'd grown so self-pitying and isolated. And no wonder I'd hated Princeton, that dreamland that seemed to dream only about itself (and asked that the world and its students do the same). But then, in Philadelphia, at what seemed to me like the last minute and in the most outlandish fashion, I discovered the truth--if words like "truth" mean anything. And even if they don't, perhaps.
Pause in your knowing to be known. Quit pushing--let yourself be pulled. Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.
210, on differences between him and his childhood friend Karl, who had developed an interest in art and literature and thought Walt would be fun to talk to - To begin with, I couldn't quote the trascendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn't quote anyone, reliably. I'd honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain works in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some "classic" or "masterpiece," for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back it if looked like it was changing.
Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They'd gotten me through Princeton, they hadn't quite kept me from Oxford, and these I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now--not by memorizing Ralph Waldo Emerson. I'd found out a lot since I'd aced the SATs, about the system, about myself, and about the new class that the system had created, which I was not part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.
211 - My cynicism was creeping back, but later that summer something happened that changed me--not instantly but decisively...One feverish night I found myself in the living room standing before the bookcase containing my mother's classics for the masses. I'd passed right by them a thousand times, scanned their titles no more than once a year, skimmed a couple of them, finished just one (and hilariously misread it--The Great Gatsby), but that night, bored and sick, I took one down and held it tight: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Then I did something unprecedented for me: I carried it to my steamy bedroom and actually let it absorb me, page by page, chapter by chapter, straight on to the end. A few days later I repeated the feat with Great Expectations, another canonical stalwart that I'd somehow gotten through Princeton without opening. Shockingly, I already knew the story: Miss Havisham, a lunatic old woman, is thought to be the secret patron of Pip, the waifish boy who becomes a London gentleman.
And so, belatedly, haltingly, accidentally, and quite implausibly and incredibly, it began at last: my education. I wasn't sure what it would get me, whose approval it might win, or how long it might take to complete (forever, I had an inkling), but for once those weren't my first concerns. Alone in my room, congested and exhausted, I forgot my obsession with self-advancement. I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. Instead of filling in blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.
I wanted to find out what others thought.
February 17, 2024
[3.5] I'm not going to fault Kirn for writing a different book than the one I wanted to read, but I bought this memoir of Kirn's time at Princeton expecting the sociological analysis of Charles Murray's Coming Apart or Ross Douthat's Privilege. But Lost is not like those books. It's the memoir of a man who, at a tender age, became all too susceptible to the baubles and blandishments of meritocratic advancement, and who, in pursuit of such things, forgot himself along the way. Kirn's undergraduate days were certainly more eventful than mine, shaped by the usual varieties of teenage rebellion (petty vandalism and drugs and cheap sex and drugs, always drugs). But some of these episodes add little to Kirn's critique but the tawdry pleasure of voyeurism; and I fear Kirn overestimates the fascination these college escapades have for a general audience (he once sniffed blow with a NYC wastrel who lived downstairs from Truman Capote, wowee!) Still, these recollections, undimmed by the passage of the years, are valuable. They open a window on a place most of us will never go, and they lay bare the soul-damaging status games that take place there, games which are without end. "You shall eat, but not be satisfied; Hunger shall be in your midst."
Favorite passages:
A pure meritocracy, we’d discovered, can only promote; it can’t legitimize. It can confer success but can’t grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to overthrow. So far, the experiment hadn’t worked. (171)
[on flattering one’s betters, playing to the expectations of the elect, who recreate themselves] “Result” was not exactly the right word…because it suggested that logic governs destiny. But now I knew otherwise. Imagination does. … What I hadn’t understood at all was that our imaginations don’t act alone. One’s own imagination is powerless until it starts dancing with another. (205)
Favorite passages:
A pure meritocracy, we’d discovered, can only promote; it can’t legitimize. It can confer success but can’t grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to overthrow. So far, the experiment hadn’t worked. (171)
[on flattering one’s betters, playing to the expectations of the elect, who recreate themselves] “Result” was not exactly the right word…because it suggested that logic governs destiny. But now I knew otherwise. Imagination does. … What I hadn’t understood at all was that our imaginations don’t act alone. One’s own imagination is powerless until it starts dancing with another. (205)
June 15, 2017
What did I think of this book ... What did I think of this book ... hmmmm....
I saw Walter Kirn on a talk show, and found him .... interesting. Seemed uncomfortable in his own skin, but also had some intelligent things to say every once in a while. I didn't understand him quite. Thought maybe he could write a good book or two. Thought I'd give him a try.
"Lost in the Meritocracy" is an interesting read ... most of the time. The man has definitely had a varied and unusual life. Some of his life I'm a bit familiar with, and much of it is unknown to me. So yes, it was interesting to read. Having said that -- I had an opinion that Walter has, at the same time, a lot of low self-esteem issues coinciding with a rather healthy narcissism complex. There were some great one-liners in this book, talking about his Minnesota upbringing, characters in his town, how he managed to excel throughout his school years, etc.
Towards the end of his high school years, I tired pretty quickly of his escapades. This is a sharp guy, for sure ... but he's a sharp guy always looking over his shoulder. He's just working too hard to impress or to be found "unusual" or "erudite." Just when I was about to toss the book, he would become self-deprecating, and I would be drawn back into reading more.
The book does provide some insight into what attending an Ivy League school is like by an outsider. Mostly that just made me happy to not have achieved that particular notoriety. I might be interested in reading an article by Walter Kirn, but I'll never read another book of his.
I saw Walter Kirn on a talk show, and found him .... interesting. Seemed uncomfortable in his own skin, but also had some intelligent things to say every once in a while. I didn't understand him quite. Thought maybe he could write a good book or two. Thought I'd give him a try.
"Lost in the Meritocracy" is an interesting read ... most of the time. The man has definitely had a varied and unusual life. Some of his life I'm a bit familiar with, and much of it is unknown to me. So yes, it was interesting to read. Having said that -- I had an opinion that Walter has, at the same time, a lot of low self-esteem issues coinciding with a rather healthy narcissism complex. There were some great one-liners in this book, talking about his Minnesota upbringing, characters in his town, how he managed to excel throughout his school years, etc.
Towards the end of his high school years, I tired pretty quickly of his escapades. This is a sharp guy, for sure ... but he's a sharp guy always looking over his shoulder. He's just working too hard to impress or to be found "unusual" or "erudite." Just when I was about to toss the book, he would become self-deprecating, and I would be drawn back into reading more.
The book does provide some insight into what attending an Ivy League school is like by an outsider. Mostly that just made me happy to not have achieved that particular notoriety. I might be interested in reading an article by Walter Kirn, but I'll never read another book of his.
June 22, 2018
"I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they, too, were fakes. In classroom discussions, and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedentary study habits, and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated, appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic postmodernism that I had mastered almost without effort. To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I--a born con man who knew little about greater literature--had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability, the nonreader was king, it seemed. Long live the king." p. 122
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Lost in the Meritocracy is difficult to describe because much of the book is a voyeuristic view of one guy's self-destructive decadence as a student at an elite institution. He spends his four years at Princeton feeling lost and rejected, which was baffling to him because he expected it to be the meritocratic crown for his achievements in primary and secondary school. Instead, it was pretentious and hollow, and seemed eager to devour its own. There's plenty to work with in a critique of that and he could write that well (as the above quote attests to), but instead there is a constant whiff of 'conquest' as we see him sleep with numerous women and glide through his academics while on various recreational drugs. While he ends on a note of grace, it's hard to take it seriously because he spent the previous 200 pages telling how he had learned early to read and then play to his audience with the culmination coming at the end with his manipulation of the Keasbey Foundation to notch yet another victory on his belt of achievements.
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Lost in the Meritocracy is difficult to describe because much of the book is a voyeuristic view of one guy's self-destructive decadence as a student at an elite institution. He spends his four years at Princeton feeling lost and rejected, which was baffling to him because he expected it to be the meritocratic crown for his achievements in primary and secondary school. Instead, it was pretentious and hollow, and seemed eager to devour its own. There's plenty to work with in a critique of that and he could write that well (as the above quote attests to), but instead there is a constant whiff of 'conquest' as we see him sleep with numerous women and glide through his academics while on various recreational drugs. While he ends on a note of grace, it's hard to take it seriously because he spent the previous 200 pages telling how he had learned early to read and then play to his audience with the culmination coming at the end with his manipulation of the Keasbey Foundation to notch yet another victory on his belt of achievements.
December 1, 2024
I am a fan of Walter Kirn. I like his independence of thought, his way with words, his dry humor and sarcastic wit. I follow him on America This Week, a podcast he does every week with Matt Taibbi. So I was really looking forward to reading this brief memoir about his educational history. It started out with great promise, as a description of his K-12 schooling in three different states. (Actually, his K-11 schooling, since he skipped his senior year of high school to enter Macalester College a year early.) His descriptions of life as the world-weary intellectual amidst the children of farmers and laborers resonated, and were beautifully written. However, his time at Princeton University became a bit tedious to read. He didn't really fit in at Princeton, a fact that is demonstrated by several episodes he elaborates in great detail, about the differences between him and his over-privileged roommates and acquaintances. However, I felt that his ultimate mental break-down at Princeton is not sufficiently motivated, and I found it hard to understand completely. Similarly, when Kirn "comes out" of his break-down, I didn't feel that was sufficiently motivated either. By then I had the feeling that he just wanted to finish the book, and move on to another project, so he glossed over the reasons for his mental fog clearing and his new-found ability to function somewhat normally again. By the end, I was a bit disappointed with the memoir.
April 23, 2025
This was a good book but not a great book. A lot of the stories told were entertaining but something felt off about it, something untrue. Kirn is writing about his education and mostly his time at Princeton, where he learned how to fake his way through more than actually learning information. While I believe that you can fake your way through a lot of things in life, it didn't feel true to me that that was all he did his entire time at Princeton. I just can't believe that he didn't learn anything "real" the whole time. Plus, I don't think that knowing how to fake your way through something isn't a useful skill. I would love if I had more of that ability. I'd probably be a CEO or something. It just felt like Kirn relied too heavily on his bullshitting ability because he thought that would make for a more entertaining read, but then the book was missing a real balance, an acknowledgement that higher education can be both useless and useful, much like most everything in life. Kirn wants us to believe that he didn't start learning anything real until he got sick later in life and, being confined to home and bored, decided to actually start reading books, for pleasure and not just to pick out the key words for an assignment. I just don't buy that he wandered around for 20+ years of his life knowing nothing but how to fool others into thinking he knew stuff.
February 2, 2025
Not until I finished reading the last page of the book I came to understand why his titled this biograph Lost in the Meritocracy. Meritocracy is earned, for him he was pushed into it along every step, whether he liked it or not. He didn't pursue the fame, class, recognition, he simply followed through. One reviewer said something about climbing ladder. Yes, when a ladder appeared in front of him, he climbed, but not without struggles. He used the word "lost", I guess it's another way to say he was lucky. In the last two paragraphs of the book, he wrote he pulled out Great Expectations from her mother's bookshelf. Without opening it he knew what it's about: a secret benefactor behind Pip who eventually became a London gentlemen. This is where he is telling us he had been lucky. Like Pip, Kirn had Uncle Admiral who played an important role in his life. When he was about to move on from Princeton, Uncle Admiral wrote a letter to the Rhodes Committee.
Education didn't mean much until that point. "And so, belatedly, haltingly, accidentally, and quite implausibly and incredibly, it began at last: my education." Prior to that point, it's undereducation of an overachiever, as indicated in the book's subtitle. How smart!
Education didn't mean much until that point. "And so, belatedly, haltingly, accidentally, and quite implausibly and incredibly, it began at last: my education." Prior to that point, it's undereducation of an overachiever, as indicated in the book's subtitle. How smart!
May 9, 2025
"Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever," Walter Kirn's 2009 memoir, is a scathing and frequently comical indictment of the American educational system and the concept of a merit-based society in general. Kirn's journey from a rural Minnesota upbringing to Princeton University's esteemed halls is chronicled in the book; this path was supposedly paved by academic ambition and high test scores. Kirn's experience, however, exposes a system that, in his opinion, places more value on the unrelenting pursuit of credentials and points than on sincere intellectual curiosity and personal development.
"Lost in the Meritocracy" is fundamentally an examination of disillusionment. Kirn describes how he felt empty and "under-educated" despite being an "overachiever" because of his unwavering pursuit of success within the conventional parameters of academic achievement. The tyranny of credentials and testing, the "undereducation" of an overachiever, the critique of elite institutions, social class and belonging, and the price of conformity are some of the major themes.
Walter Kirn is one of my favorite writers, and this book, like his satirical novel Thumbsucker, was fun to read.
"Lost in the Meritocracy" is fundamentally an examination of disillusionment. Kirn describes how he felt empty and "under-educated" despite being an "overachiever" because of his unwavering pursuit of success within the conventional parameters of academic achievement. The tyranny of credentials and testing, the "undereducation" of an overachiever, the critique of elite institutions, social class and belonging, and the price of conformity are some of the major themes.
Walter Kirn is one of my favorite writers, and this book, like his satirical novel Thumbsucker, was fun to read.
September 14, 2018
Given the title and the jacket description, I was expecting a scathing indictment of our so-called American "meritocracy," a narrative exploration of how our national obsession with merit has ruined our educational system, creating ambitious, test-taking automatons who graduate even our best universities without any real wisdom of intrinsic love of learning.
And I think that's what Kirn intended this memoir to be. If that's the case, then the book fails to accomplish its primary objective. While the author's story is indeed entertaining in a grotesque sort of way, the manner in which he presents himself undercuts his larger argument. He seems desperate to blame his own adolescent identity crisis on everything from the Cold War to the President's Fitness Exam to Minnesota to Scott Fitzgerald to Princeton, when in fact his insecurities and failings are due as much to his parents' aimlessness and absenteeism as anything else.
One tendency of Kirn's I found particularly disingenuous was his excessive self-flagelation, which seems designed to make him seem extraordinary self-reflective and honest, but instead comes across as a perverse, elaborate type of humble-bragging.
And I think that's what Kirn intended this memoir to be. If that's the case, then the book fails to accomplish its primary objective. While the author's story is indeed entertaining in a grotesque sort of way, the manner in which he presents himself undercuts his larger argument. He seems desperate to blame his own adolescent identity crisis on everything from the Cold War to the President's Fitness Exam to Minnesota to Scott Fitzgerald to Princeton, when in fact his insecurities and failings are due as much to his parents' aimlessness and absenteeism as anything else.
One tendency of Kirn's I found particularly disingenuous was his excessive self-flagelation, which seems designed to make him seem extraordinary self-reflective and honest, but instead comes across as a perverse, elaborate type of humble-bragging.
December 26, 2020
I live in Princeton. I love it. I also love Kirn's book, although the portrait it gives of Princeton is less than flattering. From a young age, Kirn developed an almost uncanny ability to to mold himself into the kind of child, and especially the kind of pupil, adults approved of. Desperate to escape the Midwest and his unstable, macho father, he used his scholastic talents not to acquire an education, but exclusively for social climbing. However, once his SAT scores had secured him a place at Princeton, he realized that being the poor country bumpkin at an institution still largely peopled (in the 1980s) by very wealthy kids was one long humiliation. Put upon by his snobbish flatmates, he retaliated by setting fire to the furniture they bought without consulting him, in the expectation that he'd have to pay his share of it anyway. Too embittered and confused to make good use of his 4 years at Princeton, Kirn only started reading books for their own sake and trying to articulate his own thoughts during the summer after graduation. Kirn's prose is wonderfully fluid and funny, but this book adds up to much more than a charming, lightweight memoir.
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