Word: segaller
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...Cliffie bitchiness and the secular religion that is Crimson hockey, it's no surprise that the college portions of the novel ring true. The one problem here is that the period 1954-58 was not, to put it mildly, a time of campus unrest or even great social shakeups. Segal makes up for this with painstaking accounts of such bygone rigors as the Step Test and the Swim Test, while ignoring real campus news like the hockey heyday of Bob (really '58) and Bill ('56) Cleary (who did make it into Love Story...
...believable accounts of "life after college" in the novel-of-Harvard genre--chief among them Anton Myrer '44s. The Last Convertible--are almost absent from the late sections of Segal's magnum opus. As far a comparisons go, let it be said that Rona Jaffe '51 has a lock on the 25th Reunion trash novel category of this ilk, and Class Reunion wasn't anywhere near as pretentious as The Class, Even Love Story, while making no attempts at profundity (except, of course, in its one infamous and unfortunate definition of love), has its place in this venerable category...
EVEN BEFORE page one, the Harvard-centric nature of The Class is apparent, as Segal quotes William James on the joy of being a "son of Harvard," and notes that James received his M.D. (Harvard, of course) in 1869. Later, he also cites John Updike '54, Ralph Waldo Emerson '21 (1821, that is), e.e. cummings '15, ad nauseum. Most irritating, though, is his choice of members of the Class...
...They Can, The Cliffie Who Won't Go All The Way. The Suicides Under Academic Pressure--all awash in a sea of sentence fragments--make you wonder how anybody even makes it to the 25th Reunion. Under the truisms, however, In a number of truths surprisingly enough, and once Segal is free of the burden of relating everything to The Harvard Experience, these begin to appear...
...most interesting member of The Class (as Segal and diarist Andrew Eliot, the sometime narrator insist upon calling it) is Theodore Lambros, the commuter who aspires to be a Harvard classics professor. Ted pays his way by working at his father's restaurant, picking up a preppy wife along the way, and then plunges into the rat race that is the tenure track. As a classicist who taught at Harvard and Princeton before winding up at Yale, Segal knows the intimate details of the hard-fought battles that surround lifetime appointments including the much-desired favorable reviews in the Confy...