The Class; by Erich Segal.

Erich Segal might have been excused to take it easy after the success of Love Story, but he went on to attempt to do better, to make sense of a lot of things he lived, and did do well in the process, as a writer. This is part of that attempt and success.

It is about a "class" graduating a particular year from Harvard, and how they proceed with their lives subsequently. There is a reasonable spectrum of people likely to be in a class in Harvard though he refrains from intimate portrayals of any "special" people such as royalty or otherwise nobility or political upper class of various other nations.

The two that stick on in memory are naturally the couple that graduate in Greek, with the various colourful incidents of their lives making that easy. And while he makes it easy to admire the poor Greek lad to begin with and his family that gets an easy victory with their down to earth simplicity at the wedding - when informed by the bride's mother that they should appreciate what an old family they are marrying into the bridegroom's mother looks at her and informs her she does not look that old, taking the strange snobbery out with a sharp pin prick without realising what is going on, sort of a Greek Gracy Allen - and in a neat turn of story later it is the wronged wife who turns the tables, again with no intentions of a fight.

The husband loses even while he wins, not the least due to losing the wife for a meaningless cheating but more so due to his will to win in terms of snobbery and be an ivy league person professionally while he could not be a preppy personally. He sacrifices much for the latter purpose, dignity included, though not publicly.

One wonders at the really stupid snobbery of a people who began the nation with rebellion against precisely the feudal Europe by migrating and separating and forming a nation of supposed equals, when one faces all these various snobberies - mayflower, ivy league - and one wonders if it is not merely a hypocrisy of keeping a two tire society where you have the above mentioned (anyone heard a redneck or a juvenile bully challenge one of those? NO, they bully the supposed lessers, the comparative outsiders, of course!) and then the others who are bullied with a stick of conforming to the standards of redneck bully and his (it is his before it is hers) whims socially.

One wonders if they realise they are falsifying the foundation of the nation they are bullying in the name of with every ill formed sentence they spew out at sight of someone far superior that is clearly not of their neighbourhood nor of one of their bosses'.