Introduction

Meritocracy is the story of a generation when it was young, caught at the moment when history arrived to exact a tragic and inevitable price. It is the end of the summer of 1966 and a small group of friends, recent Yale graduates, gather in a Maine summer cottage to say good-bye to one of their own. Harry Nolan is joining the Army and may be sent to Vietnam. Also present is Harry’s beautiful young bride, Sascha.

Harry and Sascha represent to their friends the apex of their generation. Sascha has men falling for her “up and down the eastern seaboard,” and Harry, a rich and fearless Californian, son of a United States senator, has his friends convinced that he will one day be president. The story proceeds from the point-of-view of one of the friends, Louie, whose unspoken love for Sascha is like a worm that works its way through the narrative, cracking apart every innocent assumption. An aura of power, earned and unearned, assumed and desired, hangs over this Ivy League world.

And it settles at last on Harry, who on this final weekend before his induction comes to understand a terrible paradox: if he’s going into the Army simply to maintain his political viability, his action will dishonor his right to lead; but if he doesn’t go, he will likely never have the chance. His wrestling with this paradox unleashes a spiral of events that becomes as fateful for all the characters as it is emblematic of the times they grew up in.

In one sense, Meritocracy is a novel for the Al Gores and John Kerrys and George Bushes of today’s America. But in a larger sense it is a book for all those of the postwar generation who have mourned the loss of their true “best and brightest,” and who regret how the life of their nation, so brightly and hopefully imagined when they were young, and now entrusted to their care, has come to be diminished.

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Excerpt

Chapter 1

It was six hours from Boston to where we were going. It rained from Augusta to Belfast, and then along the coast road there were patches of fog. After Bucksport we turned off Route 1 and the road became narrow and roughly repaired and it roller-coastered up and down the hilly country. We passed a blueberry packing plant lit like an all-night truck stop and closed garages and repair shops and empty black farmland, and I began to feel a cool unease in my throat and in the tips of my fingers, not for the passing scene but for the fact that we were getting closer. Just as now, half a lifetime later, when the potholed road and astral blueberry plant dot my memory like so many fossils from an otherwise eroded landscape, I feel on beginning to tell this story a sense of trespass, as if what happened that weekend is none of my business, and never was.

I didn’t own a car then. I had no money. I was a scholarship kid from Rochester and I’d never been to Maine and my ideas of it were taken from old ViewMasters. Three of us drove up in the metallic blue F-85 Cutlass convertible that Teddy’s parents had given him, on no particular occasion, no birthday, not even a B+ on a Milton paper, sometime in his junior year. Cord lay across the backseat with his face in his balled-up Shetland sweater as if it were a roadtrip back from Vassar. In the argot of the time it was road shortener that had put him in this state, road shortener meaning beer. I wonder sometimes what happens to clever slang, whether literature becomes its museum or it just gets buried in the ground like the ruins of cities, awaiting chance rediscovery by the next generation of sarcastic kids. “Road shortener” I haven’t heard in decades. Cord roused himself mainly to piss, or to provide sudsy tour-guide commentary, about lobster stands and the locales of failed trysts and the size of a full-grown monster moose and about the place we were going, where his family had their compound, that it was called Clements Cove, or Clement’s Cove, or Clements’ Cove, the locals had been fighting over the apostrophe for a hundred fifty years, long after the last of the Clements or Clementses were gone from the coast. This was the weekend past Labor Day, in the summer of our graduation, in 1966. Harry and Sascha had been married in June. They were driving up separately, and had gone to Bangor to pick up Adam Bloch, who took the bus. Harry was going in the army in a week. He wasn’t even in ROTC. He was going as a grunt to Vietnam and this was the weekend we were sending him away.

All the rest of us had deferments, me to teach in Greece, Teddy for the Peace Corps, Cord for business school, Adam Bloch for grad school in economics. The normal run of things. Johnson was still president and there were still deferments to be had.

Everyone had an opinion as to why Harry was going to Vietnam, and I did too, but I never believed that I could get it all. My shortest version said Harry’s father was the three-term senator from California and Harry was headed for politics and he knew it and the wisdom of the time was that if you wanted to go into politics you had to go in the service. It kept you alive anyway. If you dodged it you were dead. But the common phrase you always heard about Harry Nolan was what a crazy guy he was, and I was sure there was something more than politics to his decision, something macho or jocky, or one of those things we didn’t talk about much because to talk about them was risking to kill them, duty or honor or whatever else. Better to leave it as Cord once said, that Harry’d rather have got himself shot at than go to graduate school. But none of us thought we knew it all, for instance how to figure Sascha, who hated his going, who would have gone in the Peace Corps with him, who married him regardless and in defiance. So maybe it came back, ninety percent anyway, to electoral viability, to the old man’s advice. In the summer of 1966 it was still a little early to be way against the war, at least where we were. It was more something to be negotiated around, or if you were already in ROTC to be embraced with gritted teeth, or if you were Harry to say what the hell.

Teddy, I suppose, was one of a type who used to roam the east coast like wildebeests on the Serengeti, Greenwich, St. Grottlesex, his father big in advertising, a skinny guy with skinny tortoise shell glasses, silky dark hair, choirboy nose and lips and a neat backward part, someone you could imagine getting the epithet “fast” added to his name, like the guy who married Tricia Nixon, Fast Eddie whoever, forgotten now but there was a time around Harvard Law School and in People magazine when he was considered a fairly big cheese.

Teddy got us to Clements Cove in five hours instead of six. We stepped out of the fetid Cutlass into a moonless night so radiant it woke up even Cord. I was a city boy, unused to seeing a hundred thousand stars, and I wandered around like a dazed dimwit until Cord said something like, “They got these things in New York?” “I know you think all Jews come from New York, but I actually grew up in Rochester.” “In’nt that New York?” Ah yes, the old New York City/New York State conflation, cracker fuck¬nose, I didn’t say, because I didn’t think of it but also letting Cord have the last word made me feel comradely. These were Harry’s friends long before mine, his old, old friends, prep school and deb parties and summer places, and relative to all that I was still a new guy, roots no deeper than the spring grass. We unloaded the trunk. We were parked on a sloping gravelly patch by Harry’s old black Aston Martin. A few lights on here and there in the house. I couldn’t tell much about the place, but that it was shingled and close by the water. I could hear the lapping of the bay. There were still a few mosquitoes and I waved them away, but no one else bothered.

A yellow bug light hung outside the kitchen door like the entrance to a quarantine area. Bloch was in the kitchen. “Can I help?” “Here, let me get that.” “Any more out there?” Jesus, Bloch. His too-ready smile, his too-eager offers, his too-thick eyebrows. Can’t you see we’re grown men, we’ve got one bag apiece, no one said, because it was a weekend and he was Harry’s latest find and we respected it and anyway you didn’t cut people like Bloch directly, you cut them by looking past them, thanks anyway, got it covered.

Or it’s possible Cord and Teddy didn’t even notice that Bloch was annoying, maybe it was only me. What was Bloch doing here anyway? He wasn’t my friend, he wasn’t part of us, he was only Harry’s friend. But of course Harry was the one going away. And without Harry I wouldn’t have been here either. I wouldn’t have known Cord or Teddy, I would have had different roommates entirely. And Sascha. Would I ever have heard her say my name, would I have more than seen her across a room or street, if not for Harry?

The main room was long with ceiling beams thicker than railway ties and an overscale stone fireplace that looked like the entrance to a cave. In all it resembled a ski lodge where somebody had gone through and taken out all the alpine motifs and replaced them with carved boats and nautical charts.

In front of the fireplace sprawled an ancient couch you could get lost in, deep-cushioned, floral-patterned, and Sascha was there, her knees up, Harry’s crewcut head wedged against her, the rest of him across the couch like a dead guy. They were so loose-limbed, that was the thing. Or one of the things, anyway. Along with her dark restless hair, almost like a banner flying her name. And the embers of awareness in the center of her star-blue eyes, that seemed to say the world hadn’t crushed her just when the world seemed to think it had. Her full lips, the slightly downturned corners of her mouth, a melancholy look, sleepless, complicated, a little bit cunning; a look of many cups of coffee, and somehow, always, injury without a mark. If her look was aristocratic, it was also not quite American, not all of it anyway. I hated superlatives then. They used to sound so stupid. But Sascha was my superlative. And Harry was my friend, and I was supposed to be his.

They didn’t get up. Harry waved at us with a vague sweep of his hand, as though making fun of how little effort he would expend to greet us, how relaxed he was, how sweet life was this night. They’d started a fire, though the evening was only a little cool. The lights were out and the fire made shadow puppet play of their faces. Sascha smiled our way. She too waved, opening and shutting her fingers, and her brief smile was enough to lift the downturned corners of her mouth. I saw that much anyway, even if as a matter of self-preservation I was trying not to focus upon her too directly, was daring myself to see her as no more than a figure in a landscape.

We said a few things. It was mostly Cord who said them. Had they found something to eat? Were they warm enough? What time had they got here? Had they hit the construction on the bridge over the Kennebec? It was his family’s place, his family’s photos on the tables, and he had a southern way about him that was half gracious and half fussy, as he made his way around the room throwing switches and checking on the mice and whether the caretaker Everett had been into the Johnny Walker again. Cord’s family were cotton farmers from Tennessee, which maybe meant plantation owners once, but they’d been sending their towhead boys north for Yankee schooling for enough years that there was an athletic trophy at Yale named after one of them and this compound had made its way into the family holdings. Cord had a faint, almost breathless voice, he spoke rapidly, he was by turns kind, malicious, and clowny, and it was sometimes hard to know which he was being because it was so hard to hear him. Long-limbed and big-handed, with stubbornly turned-up Nordic features, he seemed like one in whom the instinct to be just a big old farmboy, even after centuries of refinements and “good matches,” had refused entirely to die. Cord was in every social grace sanded at least as smooth as Teddy, but take away the

J. Press and cordovans and you could almost see a ghost draped over a plough.

It wasn’t for me alone that Harry and Sascha were like a force field. Cord too, and Teddy, and Adam Bloch. All of us who were there that weekend, at one time or another, though Cord and Teddy wore their admiration lightly, more like peers of the realm. When I was in a room I was conscious of a part of me aimed in their direction, no matter which way I was facing. If they were apart, I was bifurcated, like an isosceles triangle. If I left the room, to go upstairs because Cord was going to show me where my room was, I felt a part of me tugging, left behind, like a character’s foot in a cartoon mired in glue or pitch. These feelings diminished when I was away from them, though one or the other of them often came to my mind. I always felt the next time I saw them I wouldn’t be so in their thrall. But it inevitably happened again, with as little as Harry’s wave, as little as Sascha’s complicated smile, which this night I was doing my best to avoid.

And beyond our little group I knew there must be others, in our class at Yale or Sascha’s at Radcliffe or in Maine or Nantucket or New York or Virginia who loved the one or the other or both, or talked about how much they admired them when they too loved. I was a partisan, of course, a cheerleader of sorts, but why not? At the time I felt lucky to be close. It made my life make a kind of sense, just as two vectors aimed at the same point create the feeling we call fate.

Harry asked if we’d brought any beer and Cord said yes there was Carlings he’d put in the fridge but when Harry lifted his head off Sascha’s lap she said “Don’t go” and put her hand on him to stop him. Her voice was quiet then and frightened and sweet, a tiny diminished voice I’d never heard before. But in moments, after he kissed her lightly—just her lower lip he kissed—she let him go and he got up and that was the end of it, the end of her mocking herself on account of her fears or whatever it was. Cord and Sascha, who’d known one another longer than Harry had known her, because Sascha’s sister Maisie had gone out with Cord’s brother’s roommate at Hotchkiss, chattered about Maisie wanting to transfer from Sarah Lawrence but she didn’t know where, maybe Berkeley, get away from it all. Soon Harry was back and he and Sascha were as before and they drank a beer together. They were the last to come upstairs.

All of us slept up there, in a fairyland warren of rooms where the kids of Cord’s family had been growing up for sixty years. My narrow bed was made up with a quilt and it creaked. There were camp pictures on the walls, all girls, and a yearbook from the Ethel Walker School on the painted bedside table. Outside was the dark of the bay, the starlight barely sprinkling it. For a long time I couldn’t sleep because I was hearing Sascha’s voice when she said “Don’t go.”

Teddy was the first up the next day and he’d found some eggs in the fridge and was making some weird egg dish that required putting the eggs in the oven with cheese on top of them. Shirred eggs à la something or other. He was darting around the country kitchen, he’d awakened with such a surplus of nervous energy it was as if he could have fried the eggs himself without a stove. I stood around and watched him a few minutes and went outside.

It was a gray morning that was cooler than the night before. The tide was coming in but it wasn’t yet here, and I looked out on a landscape of mussel shells and black ooze, then the gray water looking cold and choppy beyond. The cove was cut deep and angular. On its far shore there were woods, a log cabin and a shingle cottage with a screened-in porch, a faded pier. Just outside the cove two bare islands sat, or maybe they were one when the tide was low. A rickety marker stuck out of the flank of one of them, tentative, annoying, like something a picador would stick in a bull. Cord’s house was set right by the water. It too had a pier, which sagged then regained a little of its composure toward the end of it, like one of those hand bridges you see in National Geographic movies of Asia. The house itself sat on a shelf of rock, and at first I thought it looked brave and lonely, with its mottled brown shingles, but actually it wasn’t so alone, this was a compound after all, and there were two more dark shingled houses visible through the spruce. They didn’t look as big as Cord’s. They belonged to other Elliotts, and then there was another shingled structure that looked like a shed. All this took money, I thought. The effect was not achieved without money, money as weathered as the shingles.

When I went back inside Harry was downstairs. He was in a white T-shirt and unshaved and he looked enough like Stanley Kowalski to give Brando fans pause. Harry was not one who’d ever bought into the idea of Ivy, or preppie for that matter when his parents sent him out of California to St. Paul’s. Teddy still rode him about the surfboard he’d sent east and insisted on mounting like a dead shark over his bed. Harry was someone who wore anything his mother or a girlfriend bought for him, and now he’d married a woman who didn’t shop at all. He was pretty much always down to a T-shirt and cutoffs, though occasionally a worn Lacoste would appear with the alligator falling off it. In a sense he was someone who didn’t need clothes anyway. He had a thick neck and his jaw jutted and his forehead overhung his eyes, putting them in shadows. His body was something machine nouns stuck to, dynamo, turbine, Pratt-Whitney engine. He had hairy legs, his crewcut was pure Beach Boys, and in short he looked nothing like a Yale guy or even an eastern guy, he looked like a pure California guy, who’d only gone east because he’d been caught screwing the chaplain’s daughter at Thacher, or maybe the thing about the chaplain’s daughter was true but there was also noblesse oblige in there somewhere, even in California you went east to school if you were old money enough and didn’t want to wind up a provincial moron. His full name, after all, was Harry St. Christopher Nolan, the “St. Christopher” in grateful remembrance of a San Francisco department store fortune on his mother’s side without which his father’s rise in politics would have been as unlikely as Jack’s on the beanstalk. So Harry had pedigree, even if he looked like a Marine recruit from Pismo Beach and talked with a soft twang, like a guy who missed the beach every day the surf was up.

“Hey.” Now there was a word that Harry used a lot. A lot of the time it was the only word he used. It expressed acknowledgment. Everything else was optional. Usually friendly enough, that “Hey,” but sometimes withheld, sometimes impatient, sometimes ridiculing, as though what really was meant was “Hey asshole” but he’d left off the rest of the sentence. “Hey Louie.” That was me, that was good morning, that was how’ve you been since the wedding or whenever it was I last saw you. Harry sometimes forgot. Not the way most people forget such things, out of self-absorption, with Harry it was more like he’d been overabsorbed by the world. He remembered big emotions, he remembered bright divides, he remembered if somebody’d been a good guy or asshole. And he remembered—which I did not—jokes.

We ate our eggs standing up. Teddy had put in so much paprika he could have scorched the Hapsburg Empire. He seemed to think if it was good for deviled eggs, it would be good for whatever he was making. Nobody said anything. Teddy finally said how unbelievably fabulous he thought they were and we could just shove it if we didn’t think so too, and in a pissy move was about to dump all the uneaten ones in the garbage, when Bloch walked in, wearing clothes too pressed for the country, his smile pleasant-enough now, face scrubbed. Neat. Bloch was always neat.

Teddy offered Adam breakfast. Would he like some shirred eggs, he could be the judge, he could be the neutral party, because some people thought they were less than fine. Bloch wasn’t sure which way to flop on this. The one thing he knew for certain was that he didn’t want to alienate anyone and that in this circumstance he could be considered the butt of a joke but on the other hand maybe it was good-natured and if he didn’t play it that way everyone would think he was a flamer. He ate the eggs. Um good, Cord said. Fuck you, let Adam judge, Teddy said. I said nothing. I suppose I felt too close to Bloch’s position. He took another bite. Not bad, he said. Pretty good, he said, and the rest of us managed not to laugh because we were so well brought up, but Bloch wasn’t sure.

He mopped his plate clean with his toast. Maybe he really was just telling the truth, but Harry threw his out as soon as Teddy was gone and slugged orange juice to get the taste out and I did too. We passed the orange juice carton back and forth. Harry asked me how my summer had been. I felt again the warmth in the back of my neck and in my shoulders as though it were the gaze of the sun on me. I told him I’d been in Europe. Bumming around, got as far as Rome. Then came back to make some money because I was going away again in October. You lazy fuck, he said. Sascha walked in. She was wearing a man’s shirt and her restless hair was pulled back by something. Before I could help it I’d looked at her. Not a half-look, unfocused, with others in the frame. I’d looked at her, and knew that I was still in love. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions from the Publisher:

The characters in Meritocracy inhabit a world of wealth, privilege, and status. In short, they are the ultimate “insiders” of the Ivy League elite. Louie, however, does not belong to this world. He states, “I didn’t own a car then. I had no money. I was a scholarship kid from Rochester and I had never been to Maine and my ideas of it were taken from old ViewMasters.” In short, Louie takes pains to depict himself as an outsider in this world of privilege. How does this affect and influence Louie’s narration of the novel? Is his narration effective? Why do Harry and his friends permit Louie? What do they benefit from Louie’s presence?

Harry and Sascha are idealized as the ultimate couple, the pinnacle of their generation. What about the two characters draws people to them? Do they deserve the adulation of their peers?

Throughout the book, Harry is deliberately evasive when asked why he enlisted in the army. At the roadhouse he claims, “I’m doing something I something so that people will think I’m doing something I believe in, so I can do something else.” His statement may lead the reader to suspect he enlisted not out of a sense of honor and duty, but rather to ensure a future political career. Discuss the possible motivations for Harry’s enlistment, especially given the fact that he could have easily gotten a deferment. Do Harry’s true intentions behind his enlistment ultimately serve to make his actions dishonorable? Should his involvement in Vietnam influence his future political career?

George W. Bush and John Kerry each make brief appearances in the novel. Are their characterizations effective? Fair? Accurate? Why did the author have the two presidential candidates appear as characters in the book?

The circumstances surrounding the car crash and Sascha’s untimely death are highly ambiguous. Did Bloch see a dear, or was he in fact drunk? Should any one character in particular “shoulder” the blame for the accident, or are Louie, Harry, Cord, Teddy, and Bloch each in some degree responsible? Does the accident disillusion the young men?

On page 114, Louie ponders the differences between a meritocracy and a democracy. Does Louie feel one is better than the other? Why is the title of the book Meritocracy? Is the title meant to be ironic or literal given Lewis’s depiction of his characters and the world they inhabit?

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