The Boston Phoenix

September 6, 1990

(For the accompanyiing author interview, click here.)

Class reunion
Wolff's Final Club

The Final Club, by Geoffrey Wolff.
Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $19.95

By BILL RODRIGUEZ 

The Final Club, the new Geoffrey Wolff novel that deals with two generations at Princeton, is a 371-page prelude to a commencement. No, ifts not the main character's own cap hand down the graduation but rather one 20 years later, when he responds to a family crisis by pulling himself together and turning to help others, finally matriculating into the ranks of good and decent people. Sort of an Ivy League Do the Right Thing.

Don't let this give you the impression that the progression is pat, a schematic sequence to epiphany. Wolff is a master of structure as well as content. The resonant payoff on the last page of The Final Club is a study in understatement, the power coming from the crackle in the highly charged air of personal tragedy and from our knowing each character so well by now that we read their thoughts.

The "moral education" of Nathaniel Clay, as Wolff describes it, certainly is a sustaining dimension. Nathaniel and his tube roommates reveal the stuff they're made of, enduring or finessing the haughty late 1950s campus environment, later marrying badly or coping sadly. Even Nathaniel's son, whom we eventually see at Princeton himself along with his sister, is in an ethical stew when we need him at age 10, trying to make sense of how his loving father good cheat on his wife. Morality is an engrossing through line, especially in the hands of a writer as skilled and insightful as Wolff, for matters of principal, of values, are never not complex, in section are always full of meaty morsels to chew on.

Discrimination, in both senses, is a recurring motif in this novel. Freshly fledged from a merchant class nest in Seattle, Nathaniel figures he is at one of the elite schools to learn to judge what -- and who -- is up to snuff, is better, is -- why be coy about it? -- best. Among ideas, in society. Epitomizing this process of refining judgment is a rich role at Princeton called "bicker," in which sophomores learn their place on the food chain by whether the more prestigious of the eating clubs ask them to join. They ranged from Ivy, "breathlessly aristocratic," in F. Scott Fitzgerald's phrase, to Prospect, so desperate it to cut virtually nobody. Nathaniel finds the process a humiliating one, so in that sends its successfully emulates real world experiences, such as striving for tenure or law partnership, as the universe intended. (Princeton has since broken its official affiliation with bicker.)

"Nathaniel's whole purpose, modest enough, was to be among the many us's rather than the few thems," Wolff writes. For: "Clubbing and being clubbed wasn't an incidental activity here; it was thought to be a consummation." Nathaniel and up being clubbed senseless. Along with the occasionally interesting conversations in his room, he endures hours of supercilious questions by crew cut or tweeded fools (to a query from a file card, "What is your favorite kitchen utensil?," his reply, "Waring blender," is unaccountably met with, "Why not an Osterizer?"). And worse. When an embarrassed boy is sent to inquire indirectly about any possible Levantine heritage, Nathaniel finds himself ending the conversation saying, "I'm sorry to have been coy. Put down 'kike.'" Nathaniel ends up being cut from the posh clubs, who were court in his roommates, because he wasn't smooth enough, and from the less picky clubs because they assumed he was too lah-dee-dah for them.

His roommate Booth ends up organizing what he calls the Final Club, just a confab of friends enjoying elegant food upstairs at Ivy. Nathaniel's other roommate is Virginian gentleman Pownall Hamm, an amiable sort whom we see gradually fade from sight into an alcoholic haze. Booth Tarkington Briggs is the best of class, though a compassionate friend worthy of admiration. Awed, Nathaniel "wondered how people came to know what Booth seemed to know: exactly the right thing to do, the perfectly unexpected appropriate word to say." However, the limitation of Booth's class put Nathaniel in good contrast: when the aristocratic seas that he's not good enough to crew the first rank of racing shells, he quits. What Nathaniel seas is that punishing discipline can lead to seats in better boats, displacing the arrogant clubmen who battered his spirits in bicker. However, Wolff weakens this, his best portrait, when he doesn't lay the groundwork for Booth marrying foolishly, which makes the decision by the otherwise shrewd young man seem more a function of plot than personality.

Perhaps the weakest character, and characterization, in this clearsighted novel is of Diana Carr, Debutante from Hell. We'll know people who are such egregious examples of their stereotypes, such self-parodies that we know they would make terrible fictional characters -- to extreme. Diana is a shallow beauty keeps track of people's pedigrees and prep schools and social grace is with the avidity of a bingo addict. She is fully drawn, all two dimensions of her, but her effect is diluted by our seeing an annoying excess of her, since she is important only in her effects on the smitten Nathaniel.

In Part 2, however, Wolff doesn't waste a scene. In episodic chapters, he selects emblematic moments, moments that represent more than themselves. We read the essay that Nathaniel's son Jake wrote as a boy, puzzling out his father's character. We visit Princeton twice with the three roommates, on occasions of 10th and 20th were unions, and watch them grow up. We are there when Nathaniel has a conversation with the editor of a magazine for which he has been writing an ethics column as he plans some soul-barring and print. By the hand, Wolff has left cross with a sense of knowing a man inside out, and has quietly oriented us toward the pole star above our common humanity.