I didn't actually read this book, but I did read the essay of the same name in the Atlantic and if there's one thing Kirn taught me, it's that that entitles me to fake it. With that in mind, allow me to pronounce this the apotheosis of young-provincial-freshman-finds-feet-and-dupes-rich-kids-at-elite-school literature (a surprisingly limited category: Jim Dixon? Prof at a red-brick. Michael Pemulis? Second fiddle. Felix Krull? Didn't even go to university, fleecing your way into the elite back then was more about hanging out in hotel lobbies and faro games I guess?) in English.

"We'd been discussing books, at his request. He'd looked me up that night for this very purpose. While I'd been off at Princeton, polishing my act, he'd become a real reader and also a devoted Buddhist. He said he had no one to talk to, no one who shared his interest in art and literature, so when he'd heard I was home, he'd driven right over. We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn't, in fact, and I didn't know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn't quote the Transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn't quote anyone. I'd honed more-marketable skills: for flattering those in authority without appearing to, for ranking artistic reputations according to the latest academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the background of my listener, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some "classic" work of "literature," for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if the consensus changed.

Flexibility, irony, class consciousness, contrarianism." ( )

I was expecting to be impressed with this book, since I agreed with its main idea, that there are "costs of an educational system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back-- or within" (back cover), and identified with its central experience, having a "talent for some things, a knack for many things, and a genius for one thing: running up the count.... Nobody told us it wouldn't be enough" (ch. 1), but, maybe because this sort of thing is familiar for me, probably because the 'execution' isn't what it could have been, the result is a book that I'll read once, not treasure forever. (To indulge in comparison, Ned Vizzini's "It's Kind of a Funny Story" does a better job with the idea of being held back by advanced education, and he lacks the sheer autobiographical skill of Augusten Burroughs ('Running with Scissors').) The result is a book which is acceptable, rather than exceptional.

(8/10) ( )

Couldn't put this down once I started. Devastating and true. ( )

This book was well written, other than that, I'm not sure what to say about. Kirn's background is unusual and not at all what I has assumed it to be. His father dragged the family about the country in search of something which he may never have found. Kirn learned how to work the system but never found any substance in his life. For all his efforts, he never seemed to derive pleasure or even satisfaction. That is what puzzles me - I didn't come away with the feeling that he is now beyond that. ( )

He worked the system. Better, he knew how to work the system.He was not particularly well educated. He faked it. He scammed his teachers. He took the right classes. He aced the SAT.I’m not sure I really wanted to know this. Is he typical? I know I don’t want to know the answer to that. ( )