State of Wonder

One of my favorite books is Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, and so it was an easy decision to pick up her latest novel State of Wonder.  The story follows Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist whose father grew up in India and mother in Minnesota, as she navigates through the Amazon.  Two of my favorite passages:

"Like her mother and all her mother's people before her, those inexhaustible blondes who staked their claims in verdant prairies, Marina was cut from Minnesota, the soil and the starry nights.  Instead of growing up inquisitive and restless, she had developed a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth."

"Her skin was all cream and light in comparison to her father's and very dark when she held her wrist against her mother's.  She had her father's round, black eyes and heavy lashes, his black hair and angular frame.  Seeing her father gave her the ability to see herself, the comfort of physical recognition after a life spent among her mother's people, all those translucent cousins who looked at her like she was a llama who had wandered into their holiday dinner.  The checkers in the grocery store, the children at school, the doctors and the bus drivers all asked her where she was from... Being the child of a white mother and foreign graduate-student father who took his doctoral degree but not his family back to his country of origin after he was finished had become the stuff of presidential history, but when Marina was growing up there was no example that could easily explain her situation."

Admission

After seeing the trailer for Tina Fey's new movie Admission, I picked up the novel.  I figured it made sense to read the book first, since the book is (nearly) always better than the film.*  Both the book and movie revolve around an admissions officer at Princeton.  Beyond that, though, I'm not sure how much they have in common:  the trailer suggests that the movie is a comedy whereas I found the book to be fairly depressing.

One common theme through the novel is how *difficult* it is to be an admissions officer at a top-ranked institution:  parsing through thousands of remarkable applicants who, at a certain point, are virtually indistinguishable.  After all, nearly every applicant has stellar grades, excels on standardized tests, participates in extracurricular activities, and volunteers.  And the pressure that comes with making those judgments, knowing that your decision as an admission officer will affect the applicant's next four years (if not the rest of their life.)

The novel also touches on the fact that, while high school students are plagued with insecurities, admission to an "elite" university doesn't necessarily assuage those fears:

"Inside every one of [the college] students, she understood now, was a person who didn't live up to his or her own expectations, a person too fat, too slow, whose hair wouldn't hold a curl, who had no gift for languages, who lacked the gene for math.  They were convinced they were not all they'd been cracked up to be:  the track star, the classicist, valedictorian, perennial leading lady, campus fixer, or teacher's favorite.  The driven ones… feared they weren't driven enough, and the slackers were sure they'd find out how deficient they were if they ever did apply themselves.  Up and down the corridors of the dormitories, behind each closed door, and whether the person within was davening over organic chemistry or drinking himself into a store, the Dartmouth she'd attended was populated by young people who were terrified of exposure."

While the impostor phenomenon isn't something new - and not necessarily sometimes that even goes away - I do think that it's particularly pronounced in college.  And, perhaps, your first year at a law firm. ;)

*  Notable exceptions:  Gone With the Wind, The Godfather.