Pan-Seared

     Read a wonderful George Will review of a new novel titled Class.  In the novel the protagonist, Karen, is an up to the second ultra-socially aware mom attempting to raise an equally up to the second ultra-socially aware daughter, Ruby, who unfortunately attends Betts, an ordinary moderately diverse middle school.  Karen becomes obsessed with getting Ruby into a better much more expensive school.

     "Karen, who favors single-origin organic coffee from Burundi, takes Ruby to the artisanal ice cream shop with flavors such as Maple Fennel, and with no corn syrup. When Ruby, pausing over her organic Applegate turkey sandwich on European rye, pronounces a classmate’s lunch—white-bread sandwich, Cheetos, grape soda—“disgusting,”.  Karen frets that in her effort to simultaneously save “both the health of her daughter and that of the planet” she has produced “a hideous food snob.”  Ruby became such at her mother’s knee. Karen has one of her tsunamis of disapproval when another mother brings to a playdate chocolate-chip cookies with embedded Reese’s Pieces. “Dark visions of polyunsaturated cooking oil” addled Karen’s head. Her adherence to the “urban-farming movement” — evidently there is one — is strained by a restaurant offering “pan-seared locally sourced pigeon.”

     "Reluctant to disadvantage her daughter because of her own progressivism, Karen lies about her residential address in order to sneak Ruby into a school that is less diverse than Betts but more financially flush, thanks to more affluent parents — the kind who arrange playdates by saying, “Have your nanny text our nanny.” Karen is, however, a virtuoso of guilt, and to assuage hers she embezzles money from the new school and mails it to Betts. By the time her lies and stealing are revealed, she realizes that her “negativity was like a wisteria vine that, if left to its own devices, would creep into every last crevice of her conscience.” So she returns Ruby to Betts, leaving behind the school where “the experimental puppeteering troupe Stringtheory is performing a kid-friendly version of ‘Schindler’s List.”

     Aside from being funny as hell, that last sentence made me flat out sick with envy.