Admission

"Admissions. Admission. Aren't there two sides to the word? And two opposing sides...It's what we let in, but it's also what we let out." For years, 38-year-old Portia Nathan has avoided the past, hiding behind her busy (and sometimes punishing) career as a Princeton University admissions officer and her dependable domestic life. Her reluctance to confront the truth is suddenly overwhelmed by the resurfacing of a life-altering decision, and Portia is faced with an extraordinary test. Just as t...

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LittleGhost18 июня 2016 г.
Admission found its way to my to-read list through my discovering the movie version. Being the book-before-movie person, that — reading first — was exactly what I did. And now I'm not sure I want to watch anymore, even though the film has Nat Wolff and Tina Fey (for me, only in that order, but never mind) in it, who got me into wanting to see it in the first place. The kind of confusion happens as a result of either of two situations: the reading experience having been so awful I want to forget it as soon as possible, let alone reliving it, or — so intensely powerful I'm afraid to ruin it, to break something that is so entirely and ever unforgettably mine. This time it's the second category.
This is — was, but really, is — a truly overwhelming thing. I am as much at a loss of words as the author so obviously, wholly, mesmerizingly has her way with them. They, words, are the main character of the novel — haunting, dazzling, never a single one out of place and striking you with how precisely they’d been chosen right to the very core.
It took me a little over a month to finish the book. I absorbed it gradually, not daring to miss something; at times I was so overflowed with emotions I had to put it down for weeks until I’d feel I was ready to let myself back in. The pain in Portia's post-Mark state was vivid and all but palpable, her relationship with John a burning feeling of being alive and loved (which is saying a lot coming from me, whose usual response to heterosexual pairings is a sense of infinite boredom and an urgent need to hit something, or someone, doesn't really matter.) I can't even begin to describe how completely I fell in love with Jeremiah; his personality, the not fitting in with order and craving, craving for knowledge, claiming it on his own terms. And damn I want to see how amazing Nat is playing him. But you can’t create such a character and in the end leave him barely unfolded. I desperately wanted more of Jeremiah as the story-time he’s been given was nowhere close to being at least enough.
It’s a 9/10, and I don’t want to go into much detail about the one aspect of Admission that was appalling (which of course I will); the one both the story and I could do perfectly fine without:
the baby thing. Giving up your unwanted child, the child you were not prepared for, for adoption and spending the next seventeen years regretting that decision and drowning yourself in shame – that’s just wrong. I mean, come on. Just once show me a mother who would do the same and not in the slightest feel guilty about it afterwards. Because that’s the way it should be. If you had reasons and made that kind of choice – that’s fine, and right, and nothing to beat yourself up about. The best you can do is somehow check if kid’s got a normal family and be goddamn happy you got a peaceful life. Giving issues of this sort the dimensions of the end of the world is beyond my understanding.
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Ninga27 июля 2024 г.
Ну что я хочу сказать. Книга далась очень тяжело, и если бы не ее участие в локальной игре, я бы ее скорее всего бросила.
И при этом непонятно, что не так. Может, дело в некоей многосложности, которая еще чуть-чуть и хватит через край. Может, все дело в том, что в книге нет героев и злодеев, нет землетрясений, войн и вторжения инопланетян, а есть просто кусочки жизней неплохих людей интеллектуальных профессий. Или, может, просто не верится в то, что автор пытается показать, что в рутине остается какая-то романтика. А, возможно, все дело в размеренности и предсказуемости повествования... Не знаю.
Вкратце о чем: топовый университет в стране - свой особый мир, и нам позволяется заглянуть в один его закуток, где работают с потенциальными студентами. Нам расскажут о том, как устроен годовой цикл, на что обращают внимание при оценке кандидатов, какое взаимодействие происходит между школами и университетами, какая психологическая нагрузка ложится на каждого из участников процесса приема. И на фоне всего этого разворачивается частная история.
В книге есть нежность, оптимизм, юмор, искренность, они подкупают, конечно. И поэтому очень неловко после книги смотреть ее экранизацию, которая проигрывает по всем фронтам, кроме длительности.
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LittleGhost17 июня 2016 г.
All ghost stories come to this, she understood. All ghost stories end in one of these two ways: You are dead or I am dead. If people only understood this, Portia thought, they would never be frightened, they would only need to ask themselves, Who among us has died?
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LittleGhost22 мая 2016 г.
And I just… suddenly, I just looked at them, and I realized. Every one of them, my mom and all her sisters, they went to junior college for one or two years, and then they got married. And that was it. And then it just dawned on me, you know? That I never thought about my future, and they never thought about my future. They never asked me, you know, what do you want to do when you grow up? Or if I wanted to go to college. And I never asked myself. Because that part of my life was just kind of supposed to end after a year or two, and then I was supposed to get married and do what they’d done, which was have babies. And it was totally bizarre, because here I’d come to find out I was going to have a baby, and suddenly the one thing I knew was that wasn’t what I wanted.
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LittleGhost22 мая 2016 г.
By now, Portia had dwelt in the world of the college-aged, and the nearly college-aged, for a very long time. She knew these kids intimately, more intimately perhaps than when she’d been one of them. She knew that they were soft-centered, emotional beings wrapped in a terrified carapace, that even though they might appear rational and collected on paper, so focused that you wanted to marvel at their promise and maturity, they were lurching, turbulent muddles of conflict in their three-dimensional lives. She knew that they were dying to leave home and petrified to go, that they clung to their friends but knew absolutely that no one truly understood them. When she went out into their world, departing her ivory, literally ivy-clad tower to visit their schools — and it was oddly immaterial if their schools were sticky with wealth or held together by municipal duct tape and valiant teachers — she knew precisely who they were and what they were going through. She knew that their arrogance was laced with self-laceration (sometimes, in the case of the girls, literal self-laceration) and that their stated passions were, more often than not, arid things assembled in their guidance counselors’ offices or at the family dinner table. She knew that the creative ones were desperately afraid they were talentless, and the intellectuals deeply suspected they weren’t brilliant, and that every single one of them felt ugly and stupid and utterly fake.
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