Admissions of all Kinds

Anyone who's ever shepherded a child through the college admission process or has survived it herself will appreciate Jean Hanff Korelitz's novel Admission. Princeton admissions officer Portia Nathan devotes herself fiercely to the young people represented by the thick piles of paper on her desk. "Not that she remembered them as individuals—no one could ever do that—but she couldn’t excise them, either. Instead, she sometimes felt as if she were throwing them behind her, into a great sack that grew heavier and heavier every year, and then she dragged them forward with her, all those lives." I was reminded of what was best about my career teaching English to high school seniors: the privilege of witnessing passionate young lives at the peak of their potential. Though we meet very few of them, the real life force of this story emanates from the hundreds of students whose admission files occupy Portia's desk, home, and soul.

In the fall, before the deluge of credential-stuffed envelopes and angst-filled emails begins, Portia travels to high schools to recruit students and sell them on Princeton. At one unusual private school not far from the home town she left, she meets a teacher and a student who will lead her far beyond her comfort zone to a review of her own life folder, as full of achievements and regrets as her applicants' essays are. The admissions that result are not just academic; as events force Portia to confront her own past, she must reconcile her life and her job, which conflict in a way she never imagined.

Korelitz, who worked as an essay reader for Princeton, immerses us in the facts and emotions of the college admissions process. Every chapter opens with fictional student essays that sound just like the ones my real students wrote, and no detail of the admission process goes unexplained. Some readers will grow tired of the sheer quantity of seventeen-year-old angst and the minutiae of the process, though I think every reader will come away with a new respect for the difficulty of the decisions and the conscientious, wholehearted way they are made, at least by these fictional officers. Portia's beautifully rendered personal story will still draw in those who skim past the details of her work. But for those of us who carry that great sack of lives in our hearts, it is those kids on paper who will haunt us when the book is done.