Korelitz Admission

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30910-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 464 Seiten

Now a film starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd 'A book you can't put down.' O, The Oprah Magazine For years, thirty-eight-year-old Portia Nathan has hidden behind her busy career as a Princeton admissions officer and her less than passionate relationship. Then the piece of her past that she has tried so hard to bury resurfaces, catapulting her on an extraordinary journey of the heart that challenges everything she ever thought she believed. Soon, just as Portia must decide on the fates of thousands of bright students regarding their admission to university, so too must she confront the life-altering decisions she made long ago.

Jean Hanff Korelitz was born and raised in New York City and graduated from Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge. She is the bestselling author of the novels A Jury Of Her Peers, The Sabbathday River, The White Rose, Admission, and most recently the New York Times bestseller You Should Have Known, as well as Interference Powder, a novel for middle grade readers, and The Properties of Breath, a collection of poetry. A film version of Admission starring Tina Fey, Paul Rudd and Lily Tomlin was released in 2013. www.jeanhanffkorelitz.com, Jean Hanff Korelitz was born and raised in New York City and educated at Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge. She is the author of seven novels, including The Devil and Webster, You Should Have Known (adapted as the 2020 HBO series The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland), Admission (adapted as the 2013 film of the same name, starring Tina Fey, Lily Tomlin and Paul Rudd), The White Rose, The Sabbathday River and A Jury of Her Peers. With Paul Muldoon she adapted James Joyce's The Dead as an immersive theatrical event, The Dead 1904. She and her husband, poet Paul Muldoon, are the parents of two children and live in New York City. A new novel, The Latecomer, will be published in 2022.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Korelitz, Jean Hanff

Leseproben

CHAPTER TWO

INSPIRATION WAY

As borders went, Massachusetts/New Hampshire was not particularly dramatic. There were no long bridges to cross or welcome centers waiting just past the line, with placards declaring the name of the governor. There weren’t even any highways in this part of the state, only the lacy network of smaller roads bound from wood to wood, some of them the descendants of far more primitive roads from a time before the borders themselves. Even so, this reddest of red states had always felt like a very foreign land to Portia, or so she had been taught to feel in the bluest of blue states she was about to leave. Vermont was Massachusetts’s natural sibling, its cousin up north. One drove up to Vermont to visit friends, and friends of friends, and to attend music festivals and solar energy festivals and peace festivals. But nobody you knew lived in New Hampshire, land of Live Free or Die. Over there they were too busy incubating right-wing politicians and shooting their guns to take much of a look at solar energy or — God forbid — peace.

Many years before, it had come as something of a shock to Portia when she’d realized, crossing the Connecticut River en route to her Dartmouth interview, that she had never actually been to New Hampshire. So close and yet, to a girl raised in counterculture splendor by a mother who was gynocentric in all but her sexuality, an utterly foreign country. As in:

“Why would you want to go there?” her mother would indeed demand six months later. (She was referring to Dartmouth in particular.) Cornell was pretty. It had gorges. Portia had also gotten into Barnard. Wellesley. There was always UMass just up the road. But Dartmouthd was a school of louts and bullies in a state of louts and bullies. Who needed it?

I need it, Portia had thought. “It will be good for me,” she had said. She might not have actually said this part, but she was thinking it, or trying to be brave enough to think it. Because what she had really been thinking was unspeakable in the presence of her mother. She had been remembering how, on her college tour, skirting the lovely Green on which freshmen were building their towering stack of railroad ties for a traditional bonfire — one tie for each of the ninety-one years of their’91 class — she had had a powerful surge of feeling. There had been a sense of great order, great beauty, with tendrils of that elusive thing wafting around the handsome students, like the smoke that would itself unfurl from those railroad ties a few days hence. The Dartmouth girls were — to a one — skinny and graceful, some degree of blond. The Dartmouth boys were not like the boys in her high school, who had mottled complexions and, more likely than not, hair tied back. Instead, they were like the students she sometimes saw on the Amherst College campus, where the past year or so she had developed a nervous habit of walking, or masquerading, to see if she could pass. (Amherst, in fact, would be the only college to reject her: a bitter, bitter pill.) But here were the same boys, two hours north, with perhaps an extra layer of clothing against the cooler air. And so, when the decision had to be made, she drew on the full complement of rational ammunition for her mother — the stunning campus, the brilliant faculty, the Ivy League, for Christ’s sake! — and hid the absolute truth. The truth was, she wanted to be one of those girls. And she wanted those boys.

Portia would spend most of the next decade in the state of New Hampshire, first as a student and later in her first admissions job, which was also at Dartmouth and where her first assigned territory was northern New England. In those years, she would come to know every nook and cranny of the state, charged as she was not to miss a single promising native son (or daughter) who might not be with it enough to think of applying to Dartmouth. (The college had always looked out for its own backyard, an academic noblesse oblige that went back to its Daniel Webster days.) In those years she drove every road, paved or not, from the Presidentials to the shopping outlets along the Maine border, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it coastline, the prosperous little towns in the south. She might not remember the names of the roads, but she knew where they went, and she had been on this one before. There was, in fact, a distinct familiarity to the asphalt line coiling through forest, its spent foliage littering the roadsides, and the faint smell of burning leaves in the car.

MapQuest hadn’t been entirely encouraging in its directions to the Quest School. There was something in the street address (One Inspiration Way) the Web site hadn’t liked, and Portia had read with some resignation the usual admonition to do a “reality check” to confirm the existence of the roads and intersections. She hadn’t done it, though. The town, North Plain, seemed likely to be small, and she figured the locals would know the way, if it came to that; but as she passed through Keene and north into deeper woods, she started to get a little concerned. It was nearly two, the time of her appointment, and she wasn’t sure where she was headed or where she was.

When she found a gas station she pulled in, but her cell phone couldn’t get a signal. The teenage boy tending the gas pumps had never heard of Quest School, or Inspiration Way, for that matter, but the man whose gas he was pumping said, “Wait, it’s that hippie school, right?”

“I couldn’t say,” Portia said. “I’m afraid that’s all the information I have.”

“Oh,” said the kid. “I know that place. It’s up towards Gilsum, right? They took over that big dairy barn and fixed it up. I heard they, like, keep the cows.”

“Yeah?” the man asked. “Why?”

The kid didn’t know. Portia didn’t know.

“Can you tell me how to get there?” she asked.

They told her. The drive wasn’t long, but it was complex. The directions involved a red barn, a hex sign, and a new house with blue shutters. She listened with a sinking heart, calculating: twenty minutes late, at least; half an hour, more likely. Portia drove away. She found the red barn and then the hex sign, and made the appropriate turns. The road turned dirt. There were no new houses with blue shutters. There was no Inspiration Way.

But there was, to her great surprise, a large sign for the Quest School mounted on rustic logs at a crossroad in the woods. It looked handmade, like a student project. She turned down the lane indicated (an unmarked lane, but indeed — she supposed — Inspiration Way) and drove between sudden fields flooded with afternoon light. Cows grazed to the left. There was hay, baled and piled, on the other side. Ahead, she saw the white barn with cars parked around it. A group of teenagers played volleyball. Another group, seated beneath a tree, seemed to be having an open-air class. She drove past them, parked at the end of the row, and got out quickly, relieved to be only fifteen minutes late. No one seemed to notice her arrival.

Portia hunted in her satchel for the Quest School file. There wasn’t much in it — a sheet with the name of her contact, Deborah Rosengarten, and the MapQuest directions. Also a printout that Abby, Clarence’s secretary, had given her of the school’s Web site, most of which was devoted to the mission statement. (“We believe that the purpose of education is to open doors, not close them. Recognizing that no one form of education will stretch to fit every unique individual, we cherish the beauty of each distinct mind.”) She shut the door of the car and looked around.

The barn was massive and from the outside somewhat confusing. The great bay doors that had, presumably, once seen herds of cattle pass through were still in place, but they looked unused, possibly sealed. There was nothing else that looked like a door, let alone a front door. She walked to the end of the building and turned the corner, coming upon the outdoor class in their circle beneath a maple tree. The group regarded her with some curiosity, not least the evident teacher, a man roughly her own age in a white buttoned shirt and khakis.

“You look lost,” he said affably enough.

“I’m here to meet Deborah Rosengarten.”

“Deborah?” He looked at his students. “Anyone seen Deborah?”

“She went to Putney,” said one boy. He had an open book on his lap and looked up only briefly. “She told me she was going to Putney.”

“Oh,” Portia stammered. “But … well, we had an appointment.”

“I’m so sorry,” the man said. He got to his feet. “Can I help? I’m John.”

“Portia. I’m...