March 4, 2011
ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:
Application Adventure: A Dad’s College Essay: a review of CRAZY U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College By Andrew Ferguson (DWIGHT GARNER, NY Times Book Review)
Mr. Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, and he’s a valiant guide through this emotional territory. He’s got a big, beating heart, but he tucks it behind a dry prose style that owes a little bit to Mark Twain and Tom Wolfe — to name the first two white-suited writers who come to mind — and also to Dave Barry (who I suspect wears Dockers).He made me laugh early, and often. Why do high school kids look so disoriented on SAT day? It’s not the test. It’s that their cellphones have been pried from their clammy fingers. “None of them had gone four hours without sending a text message,” Mr. Ferguson writes, “since middle school.”
“Crazy U” is a chronicle of Mr. Ferguson’s attempts to help place his son, who is 16 when this mini-odyssey begins, in a decent college. Mr. Ferguson’s boy (he is never named) is only an average student, and his father fears for him in a process that’s become a nationwide talent hunt favoring teenage extroverts and self-marketers. “I wasn’t sure,” he writes, “my son had the personality for it.” He means that as a compliment.
As this story moves forward, Mr. Ferguson makes short, shrewd detours into areas that include: the history of American education, how college guidebooks compile their rankings, the SAT tests and its critics, and the headache-making intricacies of college loans and financial aid. He talks to an expensive admissions guru who learns of his late start and fumbling progress and says, smiling: “Oooooh. Baaaaaaad Daaaaaad.”
These detours might have been, as they often are in memoirish surveys like this one, potted histories: breaded, deep-fried, dead on the palate. Mr. Ferguson’s taste buds are wide awake as he samples this material. His chapter on the SAT is a fine, provocative example. It may invite some flaming e-mail into his in-box.
An earlier version of the SAT chapter appeared in The Weekly Standard.
