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.
