Driven to shine, youth gets caught up in process

“Lost in the Meritocracy’’ is the confession of a self-labeled trickster youth who figured that success, fueled by ambition, required a brilliant show of compliance with what he perceived as the rules set by the powers that be.

As a child he strove valiantly to please his erratic father, a macho hunter and Nixon supporter on the outside, and a walking nervous breakdown within. At school he was fiercely competitive, not to learn but to shine; enthusiastically waving his hand to give the answers that his teachers - some of them decidedly weird - seemed to want. He received dozens of college acceptances not for academic achievement but for his phenomenal skill with the SAT’s multiple-choice answers.

After a year at Macalester, a top Midwestern college, he craved the nationwide effulgence of Princeton. He knew that grades and SATs were not enough, so he cast about for a supplementary push. Noticing that there were few applicants, he entered the college poetry competition and won with a fairly dismal poem (which he prints). It turned this heretofore bloated small-pond frog into a puny amphibian plunged in a churning sea of class distinctions, wealth barriers and enigmatic folkways. Along with other small-town outsiders “our talent for multiple choice tests has landed us without even the vaguest survival instructions,’’ he writes. “We all showed aptitude. Aptitude for showing aptitude, mainly.’’

An early survival test was two wealthy, upper-class roommates who ordered in a collection of expensive furniture and a silk rug. They insisted he pay his share; his funds were limited and when he refused, arguing that he had not been consulted, they ruled he was not to walk on the rug or watch their humungous TV. He submitted until they left for a Christmas break; whereupon he smashed the furniture, ruined the rug and cut the strings of their piano. Lawsuits were threatened; instead, Princeton prudently transferred him to a counterculture dorm, vegetarian and druggy.

A later test was his summons by an arrogant upperclassman appointed to administer the honor code. Kirn was accused of glancing at a neighbor’s paper in a Spanish exam. It was only to get an idea, he said, of whether he was lagging. Guilty or innocent? his interrogator demanded; and Kirn, profiting from his newly studied lit-crit distinctions, nicely proposes “unconvictable.’’ He politely regrets the way they met: The other disdainfully rejoins (proclaiming the class distinctions that haunted the college’s meritocratic credo): “How else would we have met?’’

An English major, Kirn finds literary theory a perfect opportunity for his ambitious gamesmanship. He’d read virtually none of the classics, nor would his classes teach them. Instead, he writes, they used jargon to discuss literature in terms of social, historical, gender, race and other categories. It wasn’t necessary to understand the jargon, only to employ it with conviction. “We skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.’’

Eventually Kirn’s efforts at gaming reality catch up with him. What he calls aphasia strikes, compounded by lots of drugs; he finds himself unable to summon up words. Instead of medical help he treats himself by reading dictionaries and painfully rebuilding his vocabulary.

Somehow - he doesn’t explain and we wonder - he is able more or less to keep up with his classes. Not only that: The Princeton provost calls him in to tell him he is a university candidate for the Kealsby award, a kind of Rhodes Scholarship equivalent that sends winners to Great Britain. In fact, he discovers, it’s a counter-Rhodes, seeking originality more than achievement. In a playful session with the trustees in Philadelphia he discovers that “it wasn’t mastery they wanted but a certain vain and errant daring,’’ and is chosen.

There are times when Kirn makes a meal, even a shtick, of self-excoriation even as he excoriates Princeton’s snobberies and pretensions. (In fact, the authorities seem to have treated him with considerable sympathy.) A memoir’s strength is mainly in the effort to connect; Kirn’s relishes disconnection.

On the other hand, if there is aggrandizing in the abasing, there are any number of shining insights. The last pages have him abandoning his careerist robotry and beginning to read real books - “Huckleberry Finn,’’ “Great Expectations’’ - for the first time. It’s rather an instant conversion, but what an excellent way to express it: “I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. Instead of filling in the blanks I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.’’

Richard Eder reviews regularly for several publications.