THE FINAL CLUB by Geoffrey Wolff...

THE FINAL CLUB by Geoffrey Wolff (Vintage: $11). This uneven but engaging coming-of-age story follows the social and intellectual development of Nathaniel Clay, a half-Jewish outsider from Seattle abruptly thrust into the insider’s world of Princeton in the late 1950s. As an undergraduate, he befriends a pair of quintessential preppies: Pownall Hamm and Booth Tarkington Griggs. Clay struggles to make himself at home in their aloof world, but is stymied by their effortless self-assurance. He dresses to the nines for a concert at Newport, but is chagrined to find himself eclipsed by Booth in “a seersucker jacket with grass-stained white flannels and paint-stained topsiders, no socks. Why did grass and paint stains on his clothes look so great?” Wolff draws an amusing, meticulously observed portrait of a college boy, struggling to replace his exurban naivete with a veneer of intellectual sophistication. But the characters wear out their welcome when the author attempts to follow them through the ‘60s and ‘70s, into a dreary adulthood that culminates in their inevitable return to Princeton, this time as the fathers of new undergraduates.