Customer Reviews

Admission

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Admission" is a novel that examines the complex process of selecting incoming freshmen for Princeton University from a large pool of eager and often superbly qualified applicants. Jean Hanff Korelitz draws on her experience as an "outside reader" for Princeton to add verisimilitude to her story. She also spoke with deans of admissions and college counselors to gain a broad perspective on what has become, for many, a harrowing and competitive race to the finish line. The protagonist is thirty-eight year old Portia Nathan, who has been a reader in Princeton's Office of Admission for the past decade. She is passionate about her work, identifying with the "kids" whose orange application folders contain a mini-portrait of their backgrounds, accomplishments, and ambitions. It is part of her job to visit feeder schools and deliver a sales pitch to encourage high school juniors and seniors to consider Princeton. Sometimes she manages to recruit a gem during her travels, such as "the Inuit girl from Sitka, Alaska, who'd won Princeton's sole Rhodes scholarship last year."

Unfortunately, Portia is in a rut. She has been living with an English professor for sixteen years, and they have little of substance to say to one another these days. She has few friends and little contact with her sixty-eight year old mother, Susannah, a gregarious do-gooder who spends much of her time volunteering for a host of worthy causes. Unexpectedly, during her visit to the Quest School (whose mission is "to open doors, not close them") in rural New Hampshire, Portia meets a warm and compassionate teacher named John Halsey who remembers her from their days at Dartmouth, as well as Jeremiah Balakian, a seventeen-year-old autodidact who has terrible grades but is a zealous and voracious reader. These encounters will shake up Portia's life in ways that she could never have foreseen.

Korelitz is a fluid writer who provides a minutely detailed view of the whole admissions ordeal--especially what it costs parents and their children in angst, expense, and emotional upheaval. One clever and original touch is the inclusion of an excerpt from a typical college application essay before each chapter. Some of these are cloying, others smack of desperation, and a few are poignant and even profound. The essays convey more about admissions than the author's encyclopedic explanation of every aspect of this incredibly complicated rite of passage.

Although Portia is a likeable and engaging character with enough wit and charm to make us care about her, she cannot carry the book by herself. What eventually sinks "Admission," besides its excessive length, are its one-dimensional secondary characters and its regrettable descent into soap opera. The author expects us to buy two incredible coincidences that induce Portia to take a hard look at the bad decisions she has made. As Portia clumsily deals with the fallout from her mistakes, Korelitz wraps things up disappointingly with a trite and predictable conclusion. The title, "Admission," has a double meaning, referring not only to the college admission process, but also to the importance of admitting painful truths to oneself and our loved ones before it is too late to make things right. It is too bad that Korelitz relies on clichés and heavy-handed plot elements. These keep what could have been a sharp and timely work of contemporary fiction from realizing its full potential.

Portia Nathan is an admissions officer at Princeton University who is assigned to the Northeast. Her duties include traveling to schools in her area to give presentations on Princeton to high school seniors. On her visit to one school, she encounters a man who remembers her from their days at Dartmouth. She doesn't remember him, but she ends up sleeping with him that evening. Portia's not sure why she did this because she's content enough in her domestic life - she's been living with her longtime boyfriend, Mark, an English professor at Princeton.

As she and Mark are traveling to see Portia's mother for the holidays, Mark tells her that he can't go on and she discovers that he has been having an affair and his other girlfriend is pregnant. He returns to Princeton and Portia continues on to her mother's alone. Upon arrival, Portia finds that her mother has taken in a pregnant seventeen year old and intends to help her raise the baby. All of this news throws Portia into a deep depression that leaves her barely able to function. Things from her past come back to haunt her and she has to deal with a secret from long ago that she'd like to forget.

Because Portia is such an aloof character, I found Admission, by Jean Hanff Korelitz a little slow at the beginning, but once I got into it, I didn't want to put it down. I found the details of the admission process at Ivy League colleges fascinating and found myself thankful that I went to college before U. S. News & World Report started their college rankings. I found that Portia was much more complex than she seemed on the surface and I just had to know what her secret was. Portia's mother, Susannah, was a free-spirit and I enjoyed reading about her. Susannah's the type of woman I admire and love to talk to, but frankly, I'm glad my mother's not like her. Overall, I thought this character driven book was great.

As soon as I heard that Admission was about a Princeton admissions officer, I knew I wanted to read it. I love most books set on college campuses, not because I miss college, but because I romanticize the world of academia in my head. I feel like it's this place devoted to learning and knowledge, above the petty politics of the outside world. Of course, it's not actually like that, but I enjoy picturing it in my head!

Admission is an absolutely enthralling look inside the college admissions process. Written by a former part-time admissions officer from Princeton, Jean Hanff Korelitz knows her stuff. It's incredibly interesting to see what really goes on behind the scenes. When you are applying to college, there is such mystery behind whether you will get accepted or not. I really loved reading this book about the other side. It was nice to know that there is a human face and are human emotions behind this difficult but crucial process.

I also really liked hearing other people's arguments with Portia about the college admissions process, and her defense. I especially liked it when she went on her rants, about how whenever Princeton tried to do anything differently, it made someone angry. For example, when Princeton denies a legacy kid, the legacies get angry. But regular kids get angry when the legacy kids seem to have an easier time getting in. It's always a trade-off; I'm not sure I thought of it that way before.

I liked the character of Portia. It's clear that she was really invested in her job and took it seriously. She was passionate about her work, yet managed to be polite to those people that accosted her at dinner parties (I imagine that would be a huge downside to her job). She was an incredibly complicated character; it's obvious she had hurts and pains stretching back to college that she hadn't quite dealt with yet. The entire book hints around the mystery of what happened between her and her ex-boyfriend Tom. However, when the book finally got there, I wasn't really that interested. I was much more taken by the college admissions storyline than I was about Portia's past.

Admission is a fascinating read for anyone remotely interested in academia or in the college admissions process. I definitely recommend it!

[...]

It was an interesting book and held my interest. The author captures very well what admissions and admission readers go through during reading season. A fun, campy book grounded in the reality of admissions, a worthwhile read.

Admission's title plays off its dual meaning - "admission" being both the act of letting something in and letting something out. After well over a decade as an Ivy League college-admissions officer (first at her alma mater, Dartmouth, and then at Princeton), both of those definitions converge in one academic year for Portia Nathan.

Portia's professional life revolves around "travel season," when she visits secondary schools to give presentations to prospective Princeton applicants and answer their questions; "reading season," when the admissions staff is immersed in reviewing thousands of applicant files; and "decision season," when officers discuss and determine the fate of every single applicant in committee. During this particular travel season, one of her visits is to a new experimental school in New Hampshire, where she encounters a former Dartmouth classmate on the faculty and one unusual student who makes a special impression on her; they stay on her mind throughout her other travels, distracting her from the strain in her relationship with her long-time partner, Mark, until he shocks her to attention by an admission of his own. The total immersion of reading season gives Portia an excuse to avoid thinking about her domestic life, while contemplating the files of applicants - including that one unusual student, who turns up for a campus visit along with that faculty member - pulls her in other directions. The approach of decision season finds her being drawn back to some of her own decisions -and non-admissions - in the past, and how they got her to where she is now.

The novel mixes the nuts and bolts of the college-admissions process with Portia's story, and I thought author Jean Hanff Korelitz did this very well. Part of her research for the novel included a stint as a seasonal application reader in Princeton University's real-life Admissions Office; while some of the details may apply more at highly selective colleges than to U of State, there's a lot of interesting insight into what colleges look for from prospective students, and what they do with it. Each chapter opens with an excerpt from a college-application essay, and sketches of the applicants Portia is getting to know through the files she's reading are sprinkled throughout the novel. It's not always clear what they have to do with the main plot, but I found them engaging rather than distracting.

There are a few threads to the story that are a bit more distracting - for me, the biggest one was the sideline concerning Portia's mother Susannah. It's not irrelevant, and I understand why it's there, but it felt bigger than necessary to me. On the whole, though, this struck me as one of those books where the reader has to be patient and trust the writer; most of the elements that seem random at first really do have a place in the context of revealing Portia's character.

I have a passing familiarity with Portia's academic surroundings (I was a faculty wife in my former life with my former husband), and fiction in that setting frequently appeals to me. However, despite that, I saw this as a "domestic" novel; the suspense and drama in the story are of the everyday, character-driven variety, and much of the plot wasn't hard for me to anticipate. I like that too, though, so it wasn't a drawback. But I think one's reaction to the novel depends on how one feels about Portia, ultimately. I liked and related to her, and felt that her personal growth over the year spanned by the story was believable.

As other reviewers noted, Admission focuses on a 38-year-old admissions offer at one of the most prestigious Ivy League universities. While on an ordinary recruiting trip, Portia visits a private high school that's out of the way literally as well as academically. The visit turns into an encounter with a man who had known her in her own undergraduate days at Dartmouth.

This visit turns out to have surprising consequences. Around the same time, Portia's lover decides to leave. Portia realizes her job has grown stale. And her mother's "do-good" decision to help another young woman has helped Portia remember some of her own early decisions. These circumstances all come together in one climactic, definitive act at the very end of the book.

The book would have been excellent if it were at least 100 pages shorter. Portia's inner reflections grow wearying after awhile. She's complex but her decisions during the novel seem too simplistic.

The best parts of the novel focus on Portia's role as an admissions officer. After getting a Seven Sisters degree and then spending 20+ years in academia, I was totally unaware of the role these folks played in attracting top students to a campus. Even then, however, the book became repetitive. There are only so many ways a parent can whine.

A tighter book would have enhanced the tension in the final scenes and perhaps elaborated on why one particular student was so important to Portia. In any case, Portia's secret seems mild in the twenty-first century. At my own college reunions, a third to a half of the participants could have walked in Portia's shoes, though many would have chosen a different and more controversial outcome.

I was thoroughly disappointed with this book. Admission tells the story of the admissions process into a top tier school like Princeton, intertwining the personal story of one of Princeton's admission's officers. Portia Nathan is the main character and the only one who is fairly developed, albeit not likeable. All secondary characters are VERY one dimensional.

The story is extremely repetitive and preachy. It takes 464 pages to tell a story that could be told in half that many. The plot is predictable and unsatisfying. If you must read this, feel free to skim Portia's diatribes. Once you've read one, you've read them all.

Several other reviewers, as well as a character in the book, speak to the double meaning of the word "admission". One "admission" is the admittance of a fact or feeling and the other "admission" means, literally, the admission to a group, in this case to Princeton University.

Portia Nathan is in her late '30's. She's a graduate from Dartmouth and has worked since graduation as an admission officer, first at Dartmouth, and then at Princeton. She's also fairly detached from life outside her job; she lives with an English professor in a companion-like way and she has a troubled, distant relationship with her mother, a fierce feminist who raised Portia as a single-mother. She has one focus and that is being good at her job. Her recruitment territory has recently changed from the Pacific states to the New England area.

During one of her swings through Massachusetts - after a stop at perfect-prep school Deerfield Academy - she finds her way to a new, charter school in the wilds and meets the students, one of whom is a challenging young man in whom she develops an interest. She also meets a man, a fellow student from Dartmouth, who is now a teacher at the school.

Okay, now I digress. A couple of weeks ago I read and reviewed "Nanny Returns", a poorly written - and edited - book by the authors of "The Nanny". I gave it 2 stars (and I may have been generous there!), writing that there were way too many characters and way too many plot lines. The characters were mostly little-developed caricatures and the plot lines went nowhere.

I felt the exact opposite with Korelitz's novel. She also has many characters and plots, but the characters were fleshed-out and the plot lines actually went somewhere. The reader may not like where they went or the sometimes slow pace they took in getting there, but at least there WAS a plot and interesting characters.
Is the book too long? Yeeeah...but I was never bored, so I can't take off a star for length.

Back to "admission" and that double meaning. Korelitz writes about both in the novel. The "admission" to Princeton and Portia's own "admission" to her friends and family of something in her past she had kept well-hidden. Both are interesting and I can only thank the lucky stars that I no longer have high school-aged children who are facing the agony of applying to college. Korelitz, a resident of Princeton, NJ and the wife of the English poet Paul Muldoon, was a "reader" of admission applications for two years at Princeton. She describes in detail both the agonies of being the admission officer on one end and of the high school student - the applicant - on the other. NOT easy - either part!

Korelitz's book is good reading. She uses what I think are probably real quotes from actual college applications at the beginning of every chapter. They contribute a feeling of reality in the novel.

"Admission" is enjoyable read, though it misses reaching the heights of greatness, like so many of the competent, smart, and likable students that Princeton admission officer Portia Nathan has to recommend to admit "only if room," knowing full well there is not room to accept the large cohort of merely wonderful, but not extraordinary students who apply.

The novel follows two threads, the admission process at selective colleges, and Portia's complicated personal life, past and present. Both threads run long, and it becomes annoying to hear Portia engage in yet another involved, defensive back-and-forth discussion about how Princeton is no longer just a bastion of privilege, and how the admission process is as fair as they can make it. Whether you agree or not, Portia's point is made over and over again. As for her personal life, Portia is an interesting character sounded by several stock figures: her cheating professor partner, her overbearing uber-feminist single mother, the cute English teacher she meets who was an unnoticed, admiring classmate of hers from Dartmouth. Her past first love was a WASPy rugby player frat boy turned lawyer. The two most interesting figures are Portia herself and Jeremiah, the brilliant, self-taught student who is just awakening to his potential place in the academic world during his senior year of high school. Even if the characters conform to type much of the time, they do combine and twist in interesting ways in the present. We know that Portia has a painful secret from her past, but by the time we flash back to it, I was underwhelmed by the setup to what happened. There was much too much time wasted on Portia absolutely mooning senselessly over Tom, for about a year before she even talked to him!

For anyone over age thirty, this book effectively makes all of us wonder "How did we ever get into college?" compared to the insanely competitive standards of today. Portia, Dartmouth class of 1991, feels that way herself. I'd like to give "Admission" three and a half stars, but since I am pressed by the reviewing system, I'll have to give it three. One point I have not heard other reviewers make (forgive me if you did and I missed it) is that Portia spends so much time dealing with crazed parents who will do anything, pull any string to get their children into Princeton, and yet in the end she is very much like them. If it's true that the promising students who don't get in will do just fine elsewhere, then why did she take the action she did? I don't want to give away the ending, so I will just say that I was hoping for more introspection and self-awareness at the conclusion. Still, overall, this is a worthy read if you are ready to dive into a world of academics with all its politics, personalities, and intrigue. [I also recommend Intuition by Allegra Goodman for a smart inside view on life in an academic research lab.]

Admission, by Jean Hanff Korelitz, centers on the life and struggles of an admissions officer at Princeton University. The fact that the author was a part-time reader for Princeton's Office of Admission is a bonus, lending authenticity to an environment that already feels very real and totally convincing. But the book is not just about the university admissions process. There are other admissions--admitting people into your life, admitting secrets to yourself and others, admitting who you are and who you have been, admitting your hopes and failures--and all of these are addressed in Korelitz's novel.

Thirty-year-old Portia Nathan is driving around the countryside visiting schools, explaining the admissions process, and encouraging students to apply. She finally comes to a new experimental school about to matriculate its first senior class, and finds herself oddly drawn to one of the teachers. The students are fascinating and delightfully different, leading the reader to share in Portia's interest. And the teacher is a well-drawn character with secrets and mysteries of his own.

Portia considers herself totally different from the mother who raised her, a radical single Mom who always gave Portia too much information and too much encouraging direction. But, like her mother, Portia characterizes herself by the people, in her case prospective students, that she helps, and fails to help herself.

Arguments about the admissions process in England and the US, discussions of fairness and how it applies to something so subjective, philosophical side-issues, embarrassing missteps and cues overlooked, the trials and moral dilemmas of old and young, all bring depth and fascination to the book. Meanwhile the reader begins to guess the secret in Portia's past, and Portia slowly loses the ability to hide.

Portia's emotions, arguments, reactions and pain are all so beautifully portrayed that I couldn't put this book down. Even as I guessed and thought "Surely not," I knew the explanation would make perfect sense. The author keeps the surprises and revelations flowing right to the final page, cleverly leaving practical details to the imagination while emotional ones are fully admitted and confirmed. Admission is a truly satisfying, eye-opening read, a powerful surprising story filled with real characters, believable (sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious) quotes from imaginary college entrance essays, and fascinating explanation of the "other side" to the admissions process. Highly recommended.