Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever

In this memoir, Up in the Air author Walter Kirn traces his journey through the American educational system. Tutored at a young age by a retired admiral, Kirn endures a surreal trip through the public schools of rural Minnesota, Macalester College and, finally, Princeton University. Surrounded by the wealthy, the talented and the utterly bizarre, Kirn nearly loses his mind in an Ivy League setting before earning a competitive fellowship to Oxford.

A good personal essay is one which contains elements of both personal and universal truth. Inasmuch as a memoir can be interpreted as an extension of that form, the same criteria can be said to apply. With Lost in the Meritocracy, Walter Kirn manages to get it half-right. The book is filled with colorful character sketches – “Uncle Admiral” is rendered poignantly, upper-crust roommates are obnoxious and oblivious, a party girl doesn’t fully grasp the significance of having Truman Capote as an upstairs neighbor, etc. – which threaten to drive Kirn into the background. Despite this, the author/narrator emerges as a lost young man searching for guidance who nevertheless manages to find creative ways to assert and overexert himself. Kirn’s destructive tendencies – he vandalizes a common area after his roommates bar him from it – give him enough of an edge to steer him away from sad-sack territory and his playwriting ambitions dispel any fears that he would adopt the guise of a humble midwesterner.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t contain a lot of the larger, more universal truth. One of Kirn’s recurring memes is the corruption beneath the veneer of respectability. In conservative Minnesota, this takes the form of a deranged and lecherous old man who is allowed to teach and endanger children for decades; at elite Princeton, it’s the decadent rich, the drugged-out underachievers and many, many others. However, that things are never as pristine as they seem will come as a shock to precisely none of us.

Furthermore – and contrary to the title – we don’t really get a sense of “the meritocracy” at play. Yes, we do see the immense pressure Kirn faces at Princeton and the considerable toll it takes on him. But at the same time, we see this as less endemic of a system than it is of Kirn himself, drug-abusing and socially awkward as he is.

Lost in the Meritocracy stands out as a well-written yarn with plenty of interesting (sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying) anecdotes. But given the richness of the journey Kirn took, its lack of profundity and broader relevance is a major letdown.

7/10