No more respect for Portia

I am personally astonished at the ending of this novel. I was somewhat indifferent towards the character of Portia but now I cannot stand her. The fact that she can morally change someone’s future without thinking twice about it is not something that I could even imagine doing. I think that this twist that concludes the novel leaves the readers with a bad taste in their mouths. I also believe that this event says a lot about the kind of person Portia turns out to be. The readers see her gradual improvement from a career obsessed admissions officer to more or a well rounded person. However, Jean Hanff Korelitz concludes the novel making Portia out to be a morally incorrect person. The decisions that she has made in the beginning and middle of the novel are all overridden by this one epic decision. Although I think that it may be unfair to judge someone by one incident, I think that the switching of acceptances on Portia’s behalf was big enough to judge her character. Even if the novel had more after this incident, I don’t think that any reader could look past this and have any respect for her as a character. I personally know that I could not relate to any character that could take part in this behavior without feeling any kind of remorse. If anything, this only makes me somewhat critical of the past decisions she has made even more than I did in the first place. Although I am not happy with the ending, I am happy that this novel ended at this point in Portia’s life because I don’t think that I could tolerate any of her other shenanigans.

If I had to say anything about the validity of this novel, I would say that I do not believe that it should something taught in a college course. I believe that it does have interesting points about the college acceptance process but I do not think that it has the makings that a college level novel should. In comparison to This Side of Paradise, I do not see the literary workings of Admission. I think that the topic is too closely related to our generation for it to be regarded as a classic. I think that This Side of Paradise has the time aspect in that it is a foreign time to the readers today. However, the college admissions process is one that college students have too recently taken part in and therefore do not appreciate. I personally can also see the “classic” aspect of This Side of Paradise rather than that of Admission because generally the language is harder to understand. As sad as it sounds, I feel like I have been taught in my years of schooling that a “classic” novel is often times labeled partly due to the difficult language that the author writes it in, therefore making only elites or people of higher education able to fully understand the meaning. I do not think that Admission possesses the ability to become a classic novel anytime soon.