Word: finaling
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...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...
...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...
...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...