Review: Admission

Portia Nathan is an admissions officer at Princeton University who is assigned to the Northeast.   Her duties include traveling to schools in her area to give presentations on Princeton to high school seniors.  On her visit to one school, she encounters a man who remembers her from their days at Dartmouth.  She doesn’t remember him, but she ends up sleeping with him that evening.  Portia’s not sure why she did this because she’s content enough in her domestic life – she’s been living with her longtime boyfriend, Mark, an English professor at Princeton.

As she and Mark are traveling to see Portia’s mother for the holidays, Mark tells her that he can’t go on and she discovers that he has been having an affair and his other girlfriend is pregnant.  He returns to Princeton and Portia continues on to her mother’s alone.  Upon arrival,  Portia finds that her mother has taken in a pregnant seventeen year old and intends to help her raise the baby.   All of this news throws Portia into a deep depression that leaves her barely able to function.  Things from her past come back to haunt her and she has to deal with a secret from long ago that she’d like to forget.

Because Portia is such an aloof character, I found Admission, by Jean Hanff Korelitz a little slow at the beginning, but once I got into it, I didn’t want to put it down.  I found the details of the admission process at Ivy League colleges fascinating and found myself thankful that I went to college before  U. S. News & World Report started their college rankings.  I found that Portia was much more complex than she seemed on the surface and I just had to know what her secret was.  Portia’s mother, Susannah,  was a free-spirit and I enjoyed reading about her.  Susannah’s the type of woman I admire and love to talk to, but frankly, I’m glad my mother’s not like her.  Overall, I thought this character driven book was great.

Jean Hanff Korelitz  graduated from Dartmouth College and spent two years working as a part-reader for Princeton’s Office of Admission.  She is the author of three other novels as well as a children’s novel.  She lives in Princeton with her husband and two children and will be featured on Blog Talk Radio tomorrow, April 15, at 2:00 PM Eastern Time.