Bickering

By John Skow

THE FINAL CLUB by Geoffrey Wolff

Knopf; 370 pages; $19.95

Snobbery, the sport of twits, is nearly dead, shoved rudely aside by ethnic and racial hatreds, homo- and heterophobia, religious and nationalistic furies, yuppie loathing, resentment of California and contempt of Congress. So much truly muscular antipathy whirls about these days that it is hard to care as deeply as you are supposed to -- hard even to remember -- that they won't let your son, the grocery bag boy, into their daughter's debutante ball. Which is why it is hard to care about Geoffrey Wolff's new novel.

Nathaniel Clay, Wolff's hero, attended Princeton in the late '50s -- as did Wolff -- and was snubbed by adolescent aristocrats there, who failed to invite him, in the excruciating selection process oddly called "Bicker," to join one of the university's exclusive and very social eating clubs. Clay's offense seemed to be not so much that he came from a prosperous, partly Jewish Seattle family, but that he was unrepentant about this shortcoming. He acted uppity, as if he had nothing to be ashamed of. Thus it was necessary that he be humbled, and the cruelty with which this was done was so efficient that 20 years later the blackballing was still the most important emotional event of his life, far weightier than marriage, fatherhood or success in the writing dodge. Or so the author tries to convince us, in glum, cheerless chapters. An ending in which Clay's daughter also comes to grief at Princeton is mawkish and clumsy.

Well, Princeton's eating clubs are still causing trouble. New Jersey's Supreme Court just ordered two of them, the Ivy Club and the Tiger Inn, to admit women, provoking a few harrumphs and a few more shrugs. Social posturing was taken more seriously in the '50s. Still, readers may feel that the hero's affronted psyche is a bit fragile. Novelist John O'Hara, who never went to college, used to be fascinated by this sort of folderol, and his friends joked about taking up a collection to send him to Princeton. Wolff is a skilled memoirist (The Duke of Deception) and novelist (Inklings), but maybe somebody should arrange a scholarship for him at Michigan State.