"Percentile is destiny in America.”
So says Walter Kirn, a peerless observer and interpreter of American life, in this whip-smart memoir of his own long strange trip through American education. Working his way up the ladder of standardized tests, extracurricular activities, and class rankings, Kirn launched himself eastward from his rural Minnesota hometown to the ivy-covered campus of Princeton University. There he found himself not in a temple of higher learning so much as an arena for gamesmanship, snobbery, social climbing, ass-kissing, and recreational drug use, where the point of literature classes was to mirror the instructor's critical theories and actual reading of the books under consideration was optional. Just on the other side of the “bell curve's leading edge” loomed a complete psychic collapse.
Lost In the Meritocracy reckons up the costs of a system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back—or within. It's a remarkable book that suggests the first step toward intellectual fulfillment is getting off the treadmill that is the American meritocracy. Every American who has spent years of his or her life there will experience many shocks of recognition while reading Walter Kirn’s sharp, rueful, and often funny book—and likely a sense of liberation at its end.


“Imagine Holden Caulfield at Princeton: stranded in a rooming group of sadistic trust-fund heirs, losing his soul to deconstructionism, dropping acid, flouting the honor code, flirting with disciplinary action and heading for a breakdown. Readers of Kirn’s work are familiar with his acerbic intelligence, but in this tour-de-force they’ll find something new: Kirn turning his devastating wit not only on his world, but on himself. He delivers a hilarious, brutally honest portrait of a young man as he comes to recognize the fraudulence of the self he has constructed and struggles to become something true—a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fuck-Up. The journey from rural Minnesota to Nassau Hall may have been hell for Kirn, but readers can’t help having a fabulous time. —Melanie Thernstrom, author of The Dead Girl and Halfway Heaven

"Walter Kirn's memoir reads like the best picaresque, made memorable by lacerating self-awareness (no excuses, ever), hilarious observation, and his trademark impeccable writing. There is nothing sentimental about this education." —Amy Hempel

 
WALTER KIRN is a regular reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, and his work appears in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Time, New York, GQ and Esquire. He is the author of six previous works of fiction: My Hard Bargain: Stories, She Needed Me, Thumbsucker, Up in the Air, Mission to America and The Unbinding. Kirn is a graduate of Princeton University and attended Oxford on a scholarship from the Keasby Foundation. He lives in Livingston, Montana.