"What's your novel about?"
"Five L.A. families trying to survive the college admissions process without losing their sanity or their sense of humor."
It took me a while to reduce my novel, Getting In, to a concise answer. And it's too concise, really, to begin to describe the nationwide college admissions feeding frenzy that continues to defy predictions about things getting calmer any time soon.
Things are nowhere near calm when it comes to college; if anything they're getting worse. In a couple of weeks, millions of seniors are going to open their inbox or their mailbox to find out if they got into the college of their -- or their parents' -- dreams. And you'd be amazed, or horrified, to know how many of them hold out hope for the Ivy League or an Ivy-equivalent, one of those schools that take a single-digit percentage of their applicants.
Every year, American families go through the admissions equivalent of shoehorning the population of California into Delaware, and every year, parents convince themselves that someone else's child is going to be the one left out in the undergraduate cold.
Which raises the question of what's really going on here -- and in turn, of what Getting In is really about.
Crazy love, that's what. Generations and generations of besotted parents with a single defining goal: To give our children more than we had.
Any parent old enough to have a college applicant in the family, and young enough to have a decent memory, can look back and see how we got here. Our immigrant grandparents considered the whole schlep of a trans-oceanic relocation worthwhile if their children went to college, and the reputation of the college was peripheral. What mattered was the sheepskin. More than anything, coming to America meant going to school.
Our parents, tripped up by a Depression or a World War or both, depending on their age, regarded a college diploma for their kids as the one constant in an inconstant world. But to prove themselves, it had to be from a better school than they had attended, and it had to come with middle-class perks -- perhaps the undergraduate drove away from that school, diploma in hand, in his or her very own, very small, graduation-present car.
And what a life we drove into: the cultural revolution, the sexual revolution, a stable economy, and Vietnam, that unpopular draft-era war, for which at least one doctor in practice near my college town sold bad-back deferments. Small was beautiful -- mini-skirts, mini-war, mini-dips in the economy, nothing we couldn't survive or evade. There was still a job market. In retrospect, we coasted.
Our lives, as it turned out, were a hard act to follow. Once we grew up and reproduced, we faced an odd dilemma. How on earth could we provide more for our kids than we had?
The current generation starts out in deficit, in terms of matching what we had: They stand to make less money than we did, sex under the wrong circumstances can mean a lifetime of meds or no lifetime at all, and the whole carnival unfolds in the shadow of terrorism.
We can't seem to fix the big-ticket items, so we funnel all of our energy into finding something else they can have that's better.
If this were a movie, the camera would zoom in, right now, on a buoyant Dad affixing a snazzy decal from a top-ranked college to the rear window of Mom's hip-yet-utilitarian European-brand station wagon.
Yes, we had to send our kids to the best schools, and just as we were seized by this ambitious new definition of more, technology stepped in to give us a hand. Our children can apply to twenty schools without breaking a sweat, they can do SAT prep on their phones at the dinner table, they can get ready to apply to college 24/7 from the moment they start middle school.
And we can cede our sanity to the great tradition of exceeding the past, at exactly the moment when reasonable restraint might be a more appropriate stance.
Except the other big chunk of the American psyche is our competitiveness. Even parents who start out with their heads screwed on straight soon find themselves besieged by people who want to draw them into the annual contest known as who's got the best kid? Gandhi would have a hard time standing down from this one.
And so we go temporarily nuts; situational insanity derived from the best of intentions gone haywire.
So ask me again: What's Getting In really about?
Like I said. Crazy love.
Karen Stabiner's comic novel about college admissions, Getting In, has just been published by Hyperion Books. She writes The College Insider for the Huffington Post. Write to kstabiner@gmail.com.