Yardbirds the Class

By R.Z. Sheppard

As every author knows, people are reading lighter these days. A chapter can't be too short; a character can't be too thin or too rich. It doesn't hurt to have walk-on parts for real celebrities. Erich Segal is an able practitioner of glitz lit. As a classics scholar (he has taught at Harvard, Yale and Princeton), he understands that readers never tire of seeing the proud and the privileged lowered by fate. Love Story, his bittersweet ode to the Ivy League, established him as the preppies' Pindar. The Class is his bid to be their Homer.

The new novel follows the lives of five Harvard men from their freshman registration in 1954 to 1983, the year of their 25th reunion. Brooklyn-born Segal is a member of this class of '58, although the closest the book gets to an artist-celebrity is Daniel Rossi, a California kid whose reputation as one of the world's great pianists is established faster than one can say veritas:

"But, Mr. Hurok, I'm a total unknown."

"Ah," the old man smiled, "but I am not. And most of all the symphony directors I will contact trust their ears."

George Keller, formerly Hungarian Refugee Gyuri Kolozsdi, gets his big push from Henry Kissinger, who is given enough lines to entitle him to royalties.

In addition to the best and the brightest, the class of '58 has the bravest. Jason Gilbert, a thoroughly assimilated Jewish Adonis and the school's finest tennis player, surprises all by becoming a superhero in one of Israel's elite antiterrorist units. The last two in Segal's crimson quintet are Townie Theodore Lambros, son of a Greek restaurant owner, who fulfills his ambition to be a Harvard professor; and Banker Andrew Eliot, whose family ties to the university go back 300 years. For the record, the women in the book are all beautiful, intelligent and interchangeable.

Segal follows his classmates into middle age with clarity, compassion and cliches: "He had sired three sons. But his daughter was the apple of his eye." Rossi squanders his gifts to feed an addiction for applause; Keller very nearly makes it to the top in the State Department before he cracks under the weight of his past; Gilbert starts out like John McEnroe and ends up resembling Paul Newman in Exodus; and Lambros outpreppies the Lands' End catalog. Everybody pays a high price for success, except Eliot, who pays for his failures. To compare The Class with The Group, Mary McCarthy's 1963 best seller of eight Vassar girls and how they grew, is to measure the change in public taste. McCarthy treated her Ivy maidens with defoliating wit; Segal bastes his Harvard yardbirds with sophomore-level prose: "The athletic season culminated with the many confrontations against Yale" and "While it was arguable that his interpretation of the complete Beethoven piano concerti was the best thing put on disk during the previous twelve months, it was indisputable that his publicity campaign was nonpareil."

+ Fortunately, some Harvard graduates learned how to write for grownups. With unintended irony, Segal includes a patch of verse by John Updike (class of '54) that says more about those years in five lines than the novel does in nearly 600 pages:

Psychology was in the mind; abstract

Things grabbed us where we lived; the only life

Worth living was the private life, and--last,

Worst scandal in this characterization--

We did not know we were a generation.