A great setup and disappointing payoff in Admission

I recently read Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz. It’s my third book by Korelitz; I’ve also read The Latecomer and The Plot. Both of these books feel like the best kind of literary fiction – they’re long, but not just long. They’re expansive but not overlong, long enough so I can really relax and revel in the story, but not boring at all. They take their time building up the circumstances and plot, and going into the backstories of characters, and then things start to unravel and build and it’s great! I found both of these books so satisfying to read and expected something similar from Admission.

I got that, in part. Admission starts out like you’d expect a romantic drama to start out – a tension-filled meet-cute followed by a night of passion – but then it doesn’t continue in that thread. It turns and begins that expansive backstory-exploring, worldbuilding kind of writing that I loved in The Latecomer and The Plot. Portia’s life as an admissions officer is revealed, her past life is hinted at and slowly unraveled, and the circumstances just build and build. Admissions season ramps up, Portia’s mother takes in a pregnant teenager, Portia’s relationship falls apart, Portia’s secret from her past bubbles up into the present. Everything builds separately and together and it’s gripping but you can’t figure out just why these things that are one step off from mundane are so gripping? But at some point, it becomes too heavy-handed and there are just too many coincidences. Multiple characters who meet by chance end up being deeply connected through past events, and some of this just feels forced.

I also felt that while the book initially promised a nuanced take on multiple subjects and then didn’t deliver. Many people in the book think admission to Princeton is the be-all, end-all. Portia is frustrated at these people’s shallowness of thought. But at the end of the day, admission to Princeton is the pinnacle of one character’s achievement, and granting that admission is the pinnacle of Portia’s, the best thing she can do, the thing she can do to make up for other things she didn’t do. The nuance got flattened.

There are multiple storylines about unintended pregnancies in Admission. (I count… four?! Is that too many for one book?) The book explores the topic of parenting or not parenting a child and disrupted relationships with children in what starts as a nuanced way. But the end message is straightforward: giving up your child is never the right thing to do; and a child growing up without one or both parents will always pine for the missing person and never be complete without them. This is not a nuanced conclusion, and the heavy-handed conclusion is disappointing given the promising start.

I really liked the central motif (and title) of admission – obviously this refers to college admissions, but also to the admission or retention of secrets. The Latecomer did something similar. The title/central motif most obviously referred to the arrival of a fourth child many years after the birth of the first three (triplets), but also to people arriving or doing something too late.

Admission was published in 2009, significantly before The Latecomer (2022) and The Plot (2021). And it reads like that too, like an earlier, less polished version of the writing style I so love in these later two books.