Ceremonies of Exclusivity, Timeless Literary Questions

In the tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Geoffrey Wolff spears both social exculsivity and Princetonian pretension with his witty new novel, The Final Club. Wolff charts the voyage of Nathaniel Clay--a Seattle boy who is half-Jew, half WASP--from the deceptively placid waters of the 1950s, through the stormy seas of the 1960s, and finally to a shipwreck at the end of the 1970s.

The Final Club

by Geoffrey Wolff

Alfred A. Knopf

370 pages, $19.95

The chief victim of Wolff's sharp prose is the bizarre Princeton tradition of "Bicker," a two-week period of psychological torture originally designed to determine which Princeton men had what it took to join the college's exclusive eating clubs. The tradition has become a not-so-illustrious chapter in the university's illustrious past--many clubs are no longer exclusive, and some students entirely reject the clubs. A recent court decision requiring the two remaining all-male clubs to admit women is the final blow to this bastion of the old boy network.

But Bicker in the late 1950s, as Wolff describes it, was a positively hellish experience. "The institution of Bicker is too perversely odd for my fancy to have fabricated," Wolff writes in the author's note. Sophomores register themselves in "Preferentials," groups of students who want to join the same club. The Preferentials go everywhere together--to meals, to tour the various clubs--but for the most part just wait for the upper-class club members to visit them and ask trite questions meant to discriminate between the gentlemen and the well-not-our-kinds.

Another strange twist on this ceremony of exculsivity is Princeton's grafting onto it the American love of equality. The university's egalitarian addition to the ancient ritual of selection and rejection is the condition that everyone who bickers must be offered a bid by at least one club. Princeton mandates that one hundred percent of Bicker's participants find a home, or at least a dinner table. And so, at the very end of Bicker, while the chosen few are welcomed through the distinguished doors of Ivy, or Cottage, or Cap and Gown, and while those less fortunate console themselves with Court, or Cannon, or Quadrangle, the scattered leftovers must gather on Ivy's back porch. There, they are claimed by reluctant club presidents who previously rejected them. These unlucky, unwanted few are the "Hundred Percenters."

Clay is one of these Hundred Percenters, standing in the rain on the back porch. The theme of the hundred percent, of the extremes of completeness and incompleteness, of wholeness and emptiness, pervades both the novel and Clay's life.

Clay is not wholly anything--he is half Jewish, half Gentile. His WASP grandparents reject him completely, never having forgiven his father for marrying a Jew. He is the odd third of an otherwise perfect Preferential. His two roommates, Booth Tarkington Griggs and Pownall Hamm, are purebred patricians who breeze into the most exclusive club.

Clay's story is a search for completeness and for acceptance. His mother's ancestors pioneered west across the Atlantic, across the Mississippi and the Great Plains, finally arriving in Seattle. Clay's journey east, back to the superficial, Puritan world of his father's boyhood is in a sense a journey of alienation. He seeks to enter his father's world to claim a forgotten part of his heritage, but other parts of his heritage forbid him entry.

Clay finds that the ruthlessness of Bicker is not meant to shape character, but to test it. Only those who possess the perfect graces of class and charm can successfully scale the ivied walls of discrimination.

And almost accidentally, Clay discovers he feels most complete while studying literature with his professor and friend Johnny Hyde. Literature plays such an important role in Clay's life--both at Princeton and outside the academy--that The Final Club at times takes on the quality of meta-fiction. Clay and Hyde debate the implications of Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby: Can a person be complete depending only on dreams? What happens when people's dreams eclipse their lives? Do the fictionalized tales we tell--and believe--about ourselves matter more than the actual truth?

Highlighting these questions are the personal documents Wolff scatters throughout The Final Club. The documents are examples of the institutionalized mix of truth and falsehood we all encounter and produce in forms like college applications. Clay's and his classmates' contributions to their alumni reports and their children's application essays to Princeton are minor works of literature compared to Pope and Dryden, but they posess a clumsy eloquence and--to their creators--are infinitely more important than some long-forgotten poem.

Overshadowing The Final Club is a sense of impending doom, a sense that for all the frantic activity, all the creative energy, all the waste, all the parties, all the snubs, the characters are trapped in a world beyond their control. Like Gatsby, they try to control the world through their social creations--or at least try to convince themselves that they are in control. Their final clubs, their final parties, their finally perfect resumes cannot protect them from whim of nature and arbitrary pain, from the book's dreadful and final resolution.

Wolff's novel does a superb job of illustrating the impossibilities of relying on dreams. Just when we think we have captured them, they slip through our grasp and leave us to beat on, boats against the current. Wolff reminds us of Fitzgerald's warning that we cannot resist being borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Final Club takes a potentially trivial topic and uses it to address the timeless questions of literature. Wolff also employs an engaging style and creative approach to ground those important questions in everyday experience. And after all, Wolff's highly contrived world is not so far removed from reality.