What was that gray sliced stuff slapped at them at the first station? The serving biddies claimed it was meat. It looked like innersoles to most and tasted much that way to all. It was no consolation that they could eat all they wanted. For who would ever want more of this unchewable enigma?
THE CLICHES are far less interesting. The Preppie-Townie Couple Who Make Love Whenever They Can, The Cliffie Who Won't Go All The Way. The Suicides Under Academic Pressure--all awash in a sea of sentence fragments--make you wonder how anybody even makes it to the 25th Reunion. Under the truisms, however, In a number of truths surprisingly enough, and once Segal is free of the burden of relating everything to The Harvard Experience, these begin to appear.
By far the most interesting member of The Class (as Segal and diarist Andrew Eliot, the sometime narrator insist upon calling it) is Theodore Lambros, the commuter who aspires to be a Harvard classics professor. Ted pays his way by working at his father's restaurant, picking up a preppy wife along the way, and then plunges into the rat race that is the tenure track. As a classicist who taught at Harvard and Princeton before winding up at Yale, Segal knows the intimate details of the hard-fought battles that surround lifetime appointments including the much-desired favorable reviews in the Confy (sic) Guide, which Ted purchases at 6 a.m. so nobody will see him.
First he glanced left and right to make sure the coast was clear. Then be casually picked up a New York times and swittly snatched a copy of The Harvard Crimson Confidential Guide to Student Courses immediately burying it in the paper. Having carried the exact change in his hand he quickly paid and was off.
Unable to bear the tension of the journey home, he hastened around the kiosk into one of the telephone booths. He pulled out the magazine his fingers nervously groping for the classics evaluations.
First he looked at Greek A. It was an auspicious start "Dr. Lambros is a marvelous guide through the intricacies of this difficult language. He makes what could be a boring task an absolute delight."
Then Latin 2A "Students taking this course will be well advised to opt for Dr. Lambros's section. He is arguably the liveliest teacher in the department.
He closed the book, shoved it back into the Times, and let out an inner whoop of joy.
The whoop gets larger when John Finley 25. Master of Eliot House and Eliot Professor of Greek congratulates him moments later on his marvelous reviews.
Pleasantly idiosyncratic interludes like this one are far too few, however, and the only character whose plot line is nearly as interesting as Ted's is Jason's. Child of assimilation-bent parents, he doesn't come to terms with his Jewish ancestry until he's nearly through law school (Harvard, of course). His life in Israel doemonstrates that not only is there life after Harvard, there's life after Harvard Law--but remember, this is fiction.
THE OTHER THREE characters behave more predictably that even Segal probably would like, with melodrama dominating. Danny's life much the way respectability comes to define. Andrew's George the made Hungarian, "applies his passion for power and government to his studies which--almost inevitably, it seems--wind up under the auspices of Henry Kissinger 50 People take drugs, marriages crumble children rebel, in these lives must the way they do in non Harvard ones it's just that here they all have class years after their names.
Perhaps it's this quality more than any other that will make The Class such a hit in and out of Cambridge regardless of its often fantastical plots and awkward writing. Andrew Eliot writes in his diary about a classmate. I guess he just didn't know how to be happy. He adds--surely to the delight of any number of readers who knew it was coming--That