Book of the week: Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever by Walter Kirn

(Doubleday, 211 pages, $24.95)

Princeton University wasn’t all that the young Walter Kirn expected it to be. Raised in rural Minnesota, the future novelist arrived at the hallowed Ivy League institution in 1980 as a self-described “confused young opportunist.” He had deduced early during his public school upbringing that the point of education was to accumulate points—gold stars, sterling grades, and high SAT scores. But though Princeton looked from afar as if it might be a place where the competition’s actual rewards would be revealed, the school grandly disappointed. Kirn’s first dormitory suite mates forbade him to even touch the common-room furniture they’d bought with their parents’ money. Worse, he quickly learned that the best way to excel as a liberal arts major was not to study Western culture’s great achievements but to snigger at them.

Kirn’s “hilarious and damning” memoir raises some big worries, said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. When he refers to his college-age self as a “born con man” whose fraudulence was “the truest thing about me,” he’s skewering an entire generation of elite-school graduates who are now aging into positions of real power. What distinguishes them, apparently, is a particular form of cunning, rather than wisdom. Kirn may be blaming America’s higher-education sweepstakes for a shortcoming that was his alone, said Laura Miller in The New York Times. Because young Kirn had a deep need to win others’ approval, his academic achievements all felt hollow. But his self-involved” parents “seem a much likelier source” for his underlying insecurity than Princeton itself.

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Lost is “the rare book” that “could benefit from an extra hundred pages,” said Jacob Silverman in Bookslut.com. As good as it is in evoking the “drug-soaked, panic-ridden days” of a bright young man using voguish critical concepts to fake his way to an Ivy League sheepskin, it never offers an alternative vision of what a university education might look like. Or maybe Kirn simply hid the alternative in plain sight, said Janet Maslin, also in The New York Times. When he was 4, he tells us early on, a mentor tried unsuccessfully to teach him that knowledge is not “a strategy for improving your position” but “a way to assess your true position.”