Meritocracy: A Love Story

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Novel
Review: In the tradition of Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, and The Great Gatsby, this beautifully crafted novel stays in the imagination long after you've turned the last page. The novel has the quality and vitality of memoir -- you feel what it was like to be young back in the 60's, with the Vietnam war just beginning to stir in the country's collective conscience (a subject even more topical now, what with John Kerry and the Swift Boat controversy in all the headlines.) The characters are so vivid you feel you know them.

But there is also something more important at work here. Lewis is not the first writer to contrast the idealism and best hopes of youth with the nightmare of the years to come, although he may be one of the most skillful. But he is the first to do so so effectively with our generation, which has produced Bush and Kerry (and so many of us now pushing middle age).

Every generation produces its own Fitzgerald. Mr. Lewis is ours.