Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly
Comic novelist Boylan The Constellations takes a road trip on the elite New England college circuit with four interviewing high-school seniors and three incompetent adults, all in a Winnebago, and along the way manages to drive his farcical premise into the ground. The story focuses on confused young Dylan, who feels as inadequate as his spineless father, Ben, a widower reeling from the bankruptcy of his computer business. Dylan hides a secret from Ben it's given away almost immediately, though the author keeps trying to wring suspense from it, shared by his partying jock cousin Juddy, son of Ben's brother, Lefty, a wealthy car salesman who resents Ben for attending college. Juddy is a partier, and fencing makes him feel like a superhero--as it should when Harvard woos him so obsequiously. Filling out the cast of stock characters are Lefty's new wife, Chloe, a gold digger seeking a tuition sugar daddy for her daughter Allison, a pretty musician; Allison; and Allison's boyfriend, Polo MacNeil, a haughty Manhattanite who says things like "my good man" and "don't you know." These characters wander across college campuses which only incidentally affect the story playing out tired parts and plots: missing Harvard because of Boston's traffic, teaching each other platitudes and overreacting to petty dramas. Throughout, character and plausibility serve the author's wants rather than the story's needs. This comedy is much too broad to go deep. Film rights to New Line Cinema. Sept. FYI: The author teaches at Colby, one of the featured colleges. A portion of the book's proceeds will go to the J. Finney Boylan Scholarship in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.
From the Publisher
In GETTING IN acclaimed novelist james Finney Boylan takes readers through a rollicking -- and moving -- rite of passage with four hopeful high-school seniors (and one hopelessly dysfunctional family) as they careen across America's Garden of Ivy at its most tangled, its most sexy, and its most hysterical. What they're looking for is a place to put down roots for four years. But what they discover is who they really are and what they really want. If only they can survive the college interview...
Kirkus Reviews
In a novel so light it threatens to drift free of the reader's imagination with the first decent rerun of The Paper Chase, Boylan (The Planets, 1991; The Constellation, 1994) has contrived a fiction lacking in the richness of plot that made his earlier work such a hoot yet neglects to supply the compensations of well-developed characters, whose maturation is the theme here. Boylan makes admirable efforts to broaden the inert genre of Ivy League-style, white, proto-materialist teenhood by incorporating the parents of the hopeful youth hereþwho are trying to gain admission to at least one of nine New England collegesþinto the cathartic tale. Ostensibly, the mission that sets the story in motion begins as Juddy (surfer dude), Polo (yuppie), Dylan (sensitive and shy), and Allison (sensitive and not shy) join adults Lefty, Ben, and Chlo‰þwho, in varying degrees, are parents to the threeþin a Winnebago to travel the Ivy League circuit, with the teens interviewing at each stop. Ben and Lefty are brothers, whose latent rivalry is spiked with hidden secrets, while Chlo‰, Lefty's wife, is torn in her emerging affection for Ben. Mismatched lovers Allison and Polo are brought to their better senses somewhere around Connecticut, and Dylan comes to terms with his grief-tarnished past, ultimately getting the girl in a Wesleyan graveyard. While Boylan's premiseþthat this stressful ordeal forces on everyone life-changing examinations of past and presentþis exhausted fairly early; the sustaining. ambition of each member of the group seems to be: How to get sex with (select member of party) in good conscience? (Answer: Place friends in stressbox and shake.) Thus,the tiresome sexual irony of the title. Despite some genuine humorþparticularly during the interviews themselvesþBoylan's uninspired creation suffers from another symptom of creative fatigue: improbably tidy resolutions of the half-dozen, imprecisely explored anxieties that salt the proceeding.
