Customer Reviews

Meritocracy

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Let me warn you first, I'm going to tell you what happens in this book. And, I'm going to tell you why, so that you have plenty of time to skip this review, and go read the book and be surprised by the story. But don't worry, I'm not going to tell you how the book ends because, as it turns out, it ends in a kind of special and unusual way that depends on you having read the whole book to begin with.

Okay is that enough to warn you? And still enable you to skip this review without "ruining" the book? Meritocracy carries the root idea that the person who should have been president of the United States today was killed in Vietnam, and more generally the reason our leadership is so mediocre is because so many of our potential leaders were killed there too. It is so well written and with the life breathed into it, with such a voice and a such a view, that it cannot possibly be ruined by your knowing what happens; If this were true about any book, then no book would be worth reading more than once, and Meritocracy is eminently re-readable. I'd read it again tomorrow if I had time, just to enjoy the way it is written, but there has to be balance in life.

Harry Nolan's story is told by his friend and college roommate. It is also the story of the friend, what he saw and thought and felt and heard and smelled and remembered too. Most of Meritocracy's characters were at yale together, at the same time as George W Bush, and so the question of whether George knew Harry or had heard of him at yale comes up naturally in the course of the story. The author handles this juxtaposition of time effortlessly, and limns a Bush who might have been an okay guy. He captures Bush in just a few sentences, and saying he never knew the man, lets him off easy. In a way. After all, he has Harry Nolan enlist in the army, report for duty, and never return from Vietnam and the central moral debate in Harry's life as it emerges during the story is this: did he enlist because it was the right thing to do, or did he enlist for the reason that in order to run for office he would have to have served? It's a doubt, a self-doubt. A lack of certainty. He's the son of a U.S. senator, so the question is a real one. The question is real, and for Harry the answer has to be true.

Lewis has them all do everything, the six friends. These kids in the sixties, just after college, they do everything right; they do it the way I did it, or heard it, or saw it being done. Their back and forth, their banter, the coarse and happy language talking and messing around. Their fears. The time when boys were sent away to school and in college girls were forbidden to stay the night at a men's college and how they got around it. How they reacted to Timothy Leary and his mad ideas before anyone knew who he was or what he was doing. The importance of authenticity, how you would experience someone or something before anyone knew who they were or what it was. Lewis captures an age, a time of life, the way kids think the way they act the way they are adults and the way they are with each other. How they love, how they see incredible beauty, treasure it and how they act when it is destroyed. How they handle grief. And how they see what does NOT happen. The many scenes that did not take place, the things that were not said, what no one ever said, on the way to not living happily ever after.

They all go to the Maine woods, to a family's camp, for a farewell weekend to Harry who is reporting for duty at Ft Ord in California. He, his roommates, his beautiful wife Sascha, a unique and beautiful intellect who inhabits her world in the secure and natural way only a goddess can do; without effort. They take a skiff to a rocky island, they get lost in the fog on the way back, they run aground, they find their way, they cavort on the massive harbor bell itself a beacon in the fog. All true, so true it must have truly happened just that way. They go, they drink, they stay out late, they argue about enlisting in the army, Harry talks about not going. On the drive back, the sober one among them drives them off the road and Sascha's injured in the head, a head injury. A better future First Lady you could not possibly have imagined. Could you imagine loving her? You could. You would.

Harry doesn't talk anymore about not going into the army. He writes letters back from Ft Ord, saying what he, and we, somehow know all along. Don't go into the army, and she loved you, too, I'm promoted to sergeant, photos of some of his 60 men, well written letters, the thoughts of a moral self-doubting man, a man who could recover from a numbing personal tragedy and lead, if not survive.

What's lasting about a story is sometimes not just the story itself, but also the way it is told. This story is well told, moving, and true. To find out how it ends, though, you'll have to read the whole book.

I picked this book up at a local bookstore. It was on the bum rack, so I assumed I'd purchase it because it was cheap, and hoped that it would turn out to be a good book.
After finishing this book, I am glad to say that i bought it. The writing style is fresh, and the overall content of the book was excellent. I would highly recommend this book to anyone.

Well written revisit to an earlier time. I look forward to sitting down to read this book every night.

In the tradition of Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, and The Great Gatsby, this beautifully crafted novel stays in the imagination long after you've turned the last page. The novel has the quality and vitality of memoir -- you feel what it was like to be young back in the 60's, with the Vietnam war just beginning to stir in the country's collective conscience (a subject even more topical now, what with John Kerry and the Swift Boat controversy in all the headlines.) The characters are so vivid you feel you know them.

But there is also something more important at work here. Lewis is not the first writer to contrast the idealism and best hopes of youth with the nightmare of the years to come, although he may be one of the most skillful. But he is the first to do so so effectively with our generation, which has produced Bush and Kerry (and so many of us now pushing middle age).

Every generation produces its own Fitzgerald. Mr. Lewis is ours.

This book is well-written, tells an interesting story and ultimately reads very quickly. It seems that Lewis set out to write the great American novel, and he comes close to succeeding. Lewis falters only slightly when it comes to the character development. He attempts to paint vividly 6 characters in a mere 163 pages, and I couldn't help but feel that each was just a little incomplete. The back of the book indicates that this is the first volume of a quartet. Perhaps those novels can fill in the missing pieces.