BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Walter Kirn, when did you decide to call your book ”Lost in the Meritocracy”?

WALTER KIRN, AUTHOR, BOOK CRITIC & ESSAYIST: When my editor suggested it at the Atlantic years ago, I wrote an essay about three years ago about my time at Princeton on the notion that we‘re not very honest in this country about what happens once students are shipped off to that wonderful fairyland called college and university. And I‘d had a real hard time of it, and I was lost in many ways, and when I thought about what the system was that had lost me, it was this meritocratic advancement model that underlies American education.

LAMB: Your six previous books have been fiction. This is the first nonfiction. Why? KIRN: Well, some say this is fiction too. I‘ve noticed in some of the reviews that they find certain stories I tell implausible. That‘s unfortunate because the book does happen to be all true, unlike other memoirs that have come out recently. But I had a story to tell that depended on the credibility of the nonfiction title. It‘s about a real place, Princeton University, a real experience, my own education beginning you know at four years old, and I didn‘t know that it would have much relevance to people unless they were sure that it had actually happened.

LAMB: Well, you say upfront, and you write in an early part of the book, ”This is a work of memory concerning events from more than 25 years ago. It attempts to be truthful in its narrative. There are, I suspect, a number of inaccuracies, but no deliberate deceptions. Out of regard for their privacy, several individuals‘ names have been changed and their identities disguised.” Uncle Admiral?

KIRN: Well, Uncle Admiral is someone who was a hero to me, so I won‘t disguise his identity at all. He lived not far from these studios in Park Fairfax, Virginia. He was a retired rear admiral in the Coast and Geodetic Survey, whose job had been to survey the Coast of Alaska and Southern California, and he, at four years old, babysat me almost constantly while my father was in law school here and my mother was teaching as a nurse. And he inculcated me with a certain worldview and also seeded me with a kind of geographic education; an unparalleled geographic education that I think saw me through university, frankly. I think it was the last time I truly learned until I got out of Princeton.

LAMB: Well, I suspect somebody might question how do you remember quotes from Uncle Admiral, and what do you – do you remember of being four years old? KIRN: Well, you know when you write a book of nonfiction and you put it in story form, you‘re of necessity recalling conversations and events that you don‘t recall photographically. You reconstruct them as best you can given your memory of how people spoke and you know certain spots of time which were especially vivid to you. So there‘s no pretense to anything being tape recorder true, but these are the interactions that I remember, and this is the story the way I would tell it to my child or to a friend.

LAMB: When do you say when you‘re reading somebody else‘s work, ”That‘s great writing?”

KIRN: Well, Theodore Roethke, the poet, said he knew great writing when the hair stood up on the back of his neck, and I think it is actually a sort of physiological sort of neural response. You just lock in like a fighter pilot locks in on his target. You go I‘m there, I feel it, I am transported slightly. I know it when I see it. It‘s like pornography in the Supreme Court.

LAMB: OK, who‘s the finest writer you‘ve ever known? KIRN: Personally or …

LAMB: Yes.

KIRN: Personally? Well, the finest writer I was ever given the chance to meet was the great, legendary Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinean master novelist and short story writer, who I met at Oxford after I went to Princeton. I met Samuel Beckett too. This is – I mean I‘m meeting – I‘m talking about people who should‘ve been dead by the time I met them, but you know the finest writer who‘s working now that I‘ve met, oh, I‘m a – I‘m a novelist; Robert Stone is somebody I admire a great deal; Denis Johnson, who won the National Book Award a couple of years ago …

LAMB: And what is it – when do you conclude that they‘re good writers? KIRN: I conclude that they‘re good writers when they lead me to make associations, connections, leaps in my mind that I don‘t feel I could have made otherwise but which, once I‘ve made them, feel inevitable somehow.

LAMB: Who do you think writes today in the society good nonfiction political writing? KIRN: Well, I‘m a fan of a lot of writers. I love Christopher Hitchens. I love his facility. It‘s not important for me to agree with political writers. It‘s important for them to be able to carry me along with their argument and their sensibility in a way that allows me to entertain their point of view fully. Other political writers – well, there are people at the Atlantic that I like quite a bit, you know James Fallows, and as far as sort of columnist type you know pundit writers, I like Frank Rich of the New York Times. It‘s hard – it‘s hard to go through it all.

LAMB: Where do you live and write? KIRN: I live in Livingston, Montana, a town of 7,000 not far from Yellowstone Park. I have a commercial building downtown, the top part of which is the loft, and I do almost all of my writing there. I found it necessary at an early stage in my career, about 20 years ago, to remove myself from metropolitan life in order to observe America. And I think it‘s served me in good stead, strangely enough. Through the years I‘ve worked for Time Magazine, all sorts of magazines based in New York, and they were always willing to seed me everything west of you know the Hudson River and east of Los Angeles. So it‘s worked out.

LAMB: Where – just quickly go through the places you‘ve lived.

KIRN: I‘ve lived – well, I grew up in a – I was born in Akron, Ohio. I grew up in a little town in Minnesota called Marine on Saint Croix, Minnesota. From there went to Princeton University, which is the subject of this book. Now, this town in Minnesota is a little farm town, and Princeton could not have been more different. After Princeton I went to Oxford University on a scholarship, lived in London for a year, came back to New York City, worked for magazines, and then one day on a assignment in Montana covering a Doomsday cult that thought the world was going to end that week, I saw my opportunity because you can imagine what the end of the world has as an effect on real estate prices. Houses were very cheap that week in Livingston, Montana, and this was a big cult. So I got a house for fire sale prices as they might say.

LAMB: Are you serious on this? KIRN: I‘m absolutely serious.

LAMB: And what year was that? KIRN: 1990, yes. I was covering a cult called the Church Universal and Triumphant, which was, at that time, about 3,000 people strong in a county that only had 10,000, and people were literally selling their houses in preparation of going – for going underground and riding out a nuclear holocaust.

LAMB: So you got a good deal on your house.

KIRN: I got a good deal. I was betting against the nuclear holocaust.

LAMB: Now, Livingston‘s one of those places if I read correctly where famous people live besides Walter Kirn.

KIRN: It‘s no Aspen, let me tell you. It‘s a sort of down on its heels railroad town, which in the 70s had a certain cultural notoriety because a lot of kind of hippy intellectual artists settled there from Sam Peckinpah, Peter Fonda, and so on, and they did so because it was an easy life. They could drink in the saloons and sort of misbehave out of sight of the authorities, and through the years it‘s attracted a few movie stars and those types.

Tom Brokaw has a ranch nearby, movie star Jeff Bridges, Michael Keaton. But they don‘t really affect the society of the town because like a lot of these places out west, they kind of come in on their private jets, take a car to their splendid ranch and get out. Now, that‘s not true of Brokaw, actually. He mixes and mingles. But some other folks, you‘ll never see their face, but gives the place a reputation as splendid, when in fact it‘s a real low-earning, hard-working pretty dusty little town.

LAMB: And your ex-wife was Margot Kidder‘s daughter?

KIRN: Yes, yes.

LAMB: And when did you marry her? KIRN: I got married in 1995 to a – she was, to me, not so much Margot Kidder‘s daughter as Tom McGuane‘s daughter. He‘s a novelist who lives out in Livingston, and I‘d known him a little bit. And we had two kids. We‘re now divorced. Little Masie (ph) and Charlie, 10 and seven.

LAMB: Where are they now? KIRN: They‘re in Livingston. They live in Livingston. But Charlie‘s right now in the hospital for having broken his arm last night. So I‘m at a loss for words. I feel sad for him today.

LAMB: Go back to the story of your father and being kind of lost and …

KIRN: Yes …

LAMB: … where you lived and where you went and what it was like.

KIRN: Yes, my father – my father ended up going to Princeton. But afterward and before, he was not what you might call Princeton material. Before, he was a football player in Central Akron, Ohio, and he was recruited for the football team, was recruited by several Ivy League schools. He didn‘t know the difference between them, he told me. He went out to Princeton because they gave him the best deal and they didn‘t require him to work. He studied engineering, wanting, like a lot of athletes, to have something practical in case his athletic career didn‘t work out. People go to Princeton on football scholarships don‘t end up playing pro.

So after he left, he became a – he moved to Washington, became a patent attorney, and then we moved out to Minnesota. My father reacted somehow badly I think to corporate life and to his Ivy League education, such that he moved our family to a tiny little farm, not on the outskirts of the city but well beyond the outskirts, where we farmed with horses, and I went to a public school with no real idea about the places he‘d been or the kind of places I was going to end up.

LAMB: So how did the Mormonism thing come to your life? KIRN: Well, when I was about 12 years old, my father had a sort of difficult year, the death of his father, some job difficulties …

LAMB: And you‘re living where at the time? KIRN: Living in Phoenix, Arizona, of all places. We kind of split the Midwest in a great Sunbelt enthusiastic hurry, thinking that was the land of opportunity. It turned out not to be. The family was under great stress, and the Mormon missionaries came to the door, knocked and had one of their rare success stories where they actually converted a family within not too many weeks, and I became a Mormon and practiced Mormonism as a teenager.

LAMB: For how long? KIRN: Till I was 17.

LAMB: How in those five years then did it change your life? KIRN: Well, it changed my life in several ways. First of all, being a Mormon in the Midwest, where they were not a majority religion, gave me a real feeling of being an outsider. You know Mormonism, I think as we‘ve seen, demonstrated in the last election and what‘s going on with California as Proposition 8, is still a religion looked upon somewhat dubiously by mainstream society. So it gave me a feeling of being sort of marginalized and outside the mainstream. It also allowed me, because there‘s no paid clergy in Mormonism, to do a lot of public speaking in Sunday meetings, and I think that experience sort of allowed me to hone – I hesitate to say glibness that probably served me in good stead as I attempted to get into Princeton and then survive Princeton.

LAMB: So what does it look like inside the Mormon Church looking out versus those of us that have not been inside of it? What‘s – what goes on in a Mormon church that we don‘t see when you‘re not a member? KIRN: Well, the churches themselves are open to the public. It‘s the temples that are not. Really what goes on are lessons on the Book of Mormon and the various Mormon scriptures, which the layperson would probably have little understanding of. They‘re rather peculiar scriptures, from my point of view, and you know moral exhortation of a fairly typical kind.

What‘s important to realize is that Mormonism is not at all the same as sort of Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity. It‘s got a wholly different history, and it‘s still attempting to win mainstream respectability. The Mormons were really great radicals when they started out, and you know because of their pro-abolitionist views and other radical opinions at the time, they were moved from place to place till they ended up in the desert in Salt Lake City. Then, having foresworn polygamy in this century, they‘ve tried to come back and sort of clothe themselves in establishment garb, and no one looks more establishment garbed than Mitt Romney say, and yet they still can‘t quite crack the mainstream‘s barrier against them.

LAMB: Why did you leave it at 17? KIRN: I left it at 17 because Mormons at – Mormon males at that age are expected to go on missions and evangelize, and I was much more interested in getting an education and sort of succeeding in more conventional terms.

LAMB: Where did religion take you for the rest of your life?

KIRN: Well, I can confess without any real apology to being a religious person, probably a Christian of some description. It took me to the place where you remain a permanent skeptic of the claims of rationalism but can‘t be completely compelled by the claims of doctrine either. So I guess I exist in a kind of netherworld of belief in something but a real skepticism towards those who believe in what are purely secular values.

LAMB: Let‘s go back to that loft in Livingston; is it still there? Do you still use it? KIRN: Oh, yes. I still use it all the time.

LAMB: What hours of the day do you find yourself there? KIRN: All hours. It‘s my – it‘s my privilege to command my own space and have no neighbors so that I can work you know dawn to dusk or dusk to dawn or any combination thereof. I wish that I were a more sort of scheduled and regimented writer, but I do depend – and I think this goes back to religion – a little bit on the spirit or inspiration, and it can take me at any time.

LAMB: So when would we normally see you working? KIRN: Oh, you can reliably see me working at 2:00 a.m. You might see me working at 2:00 p.m., but I might be sleeping too.

LAMB: And when you‘re writing, what kind of materials do you use? Do you use a computer or longhand or …

KIRN: Well, you know I write on legal pads. My father was an attorney, and there were legal pads all around the place, and I find that it sort of frees my prose in a way that the computer doesn‘t. Typing away on a computer makes for a kind of digital regimented expression, I have found, and also for a constant self-editing that I don‘t think is conducive to the free flight of thought. So once I‘ve finished a draft on the legal pad, I move over to the computer and kind of straighten it out.

LAMB: Do you put your own words on the computer, or do you let somebody else do that? KIRN: No, I put my own words on the computer with two fingers, quite laboriously.

LAMB: So this book was written in Livingston, Montana? KIRN: This book was written in Livingston, Montana. It was – it was finished at the University of Chicago, actually. Last fall I taught on something called a Robert Vare Fellowship at the University of Chicago, where I taught a nonfiction writing seminar, and so the very last part of it was written in an academic setting, and I, not having taught in my life, have not been in an academic setting since Princeton and then Oxford. So that made for a sort of odd deja vous as I finish the book.

LAMB: You said in your book somewhere that you didn‘t think you were a very good teacher.

KIRN: I don‘t know that I‘m a good teacher chiefly because I don‘t know that I believe those things that are crucial to good writing can really be taught. You know this Malcolm Gladwell has a book out recently about how people succeed in things, and he concludes they have to put in 10,000 hours of practice before they‘re masterful or proficient, and I think that‘s true, and I don‘t know that coming to a student cold with a few precepts I can get them anywhere. As a teacher, all I do is really say don‘t give up and try to expose them to some good examples.

LAMB: How many students in your seminar that you taught?

KIRN: Twelve. Twelve.

LAMB: OK, I‘m in your seminar right now, and I‘ve been writing a lot, say – and I say to you, Mr. Kirn, give me three things that you know about writing that might help me do a better job of nonfiction writing, what would you tell me? KIRN: Number one, I would tell you that the most important act in the writing of nonfiction is to establish your authority to speak to write in the first place and that immediately upon starting an essay or a book you must in some way either backhandedly or upfront establish your expertise, your knowledge or your intimacy with the subject.

LAMB: OK, before you go any farther, where did you do that in this book? KIRN: Well, I think I do that in this book by saying in the very first pages of it my authority in this book is that of a bewildered young man who ends up at Princeton. Now, it‘s written all over the book that I actually attended Princeton, so I have the authority to speak of it. But I have the authority to speak of it as an outsider, which is what I‘m trying to do here, by virtue of having come from this very small town, and so I conjure up that life in that small town first of all before I sort of take you to Oz.

LAMB: OK, how much of this paragraph I‘m about to read is part of establishing the authority, and it‘s to the humane and dedicated educators who helped me find my way when I could barely see the path. First name on there is Joyce Carol Oates. Second name is James Richardson, Seth Lerer, J.D. McClatchy, Alvin Greenberg and Neil Rudenstine. That – those are – those are some big names.

KIRN: Yes, some of them are, and it‘s my luck in life that this group of people who were very helpful to me at a very difficult time should include such wonderful thinkers, educators and writers as these. You know education to me is often presented as a system or a set of schools and a set of institutions, but what it really comes down to is a set of contacts with individual teachers. And I had a great teacher at the very beginning of my life in Uncle Admiral, and I was able to brush up against some great ones as time went on. The book is about sort of the system itself, and these people actually to me were the exceptions that proved the rule. They saved me or picked me up at very difficult times because the machine or the system itself was very hard on me.

LAMB: Why Neil Rudenstine?

KIRN: Neil Rudenstine because he appeared out of nowhere one day. He was the Princeton provost to tap me on the shoulder at the end of my senior year, when I had no idea where I was going in life, and take me out to lunch and say we‘ve nominated you for this Keasbey Fellowship, this sort of secret, very discrete fellowship for Oxford, and I had no idea how that process had occurred, why fate should have smiled on me. But it really saved my – saved my bacon.

LAMB: Was this after you had lost the Rhode Scholarship …

KIRN: It was after I had lost the Rhode Scholarship, yes.

LAMB: Contest?

KIRN: Yes.

LAMB: By the way, losing that Rhode Scholarship contest had what kind of an impact on you?

KIRN: Well, it was you know I was the kind of kid who went from competition to competition, blue ribbon to blue ribbon, trophy to trophy, thinking it was going to be a yellow brick road ending in the stars, and the Rhode Scholarship competition was one of the first little tournaments of merit that I just resoundingly failed at. So it stymied me. I thought wow, I‘ve come up against something I can‘t do. I didn‘t enter the next round, and I was bewildered.

LAMB: Why did you mention Joyce Carol Oates? KIRN: Because Joyce, besides being – she was never a teacher of writing for me. I took an academic class with her. But she was also a great friend. She used to have me bar tend at her house when she threw parties for her – for New York literary friends who‘d come up to Princeton you know for the evening, and it was by letting me into her home and showing me her office and letting me see the books on her shelf that she‘d underlined as a young woman that I thought this is a job done by people, not by you know great bearded sages in the sky. And I think that sort of trust and simple friendship boosted my morale hugely.

LAMB: But James Richardson?

KIRN: James Richardson is a poet at Princeton who was my creative writing poetry advisor. As I got to the end of Princeton, I decided I wanted to be a poet. I was not a practical minded young man. Everything was about getting into places. How you parlayed it into actual you know job security or financial success I had no idea, nor did I have any interest in those things. So he was my thesis advisor, and we‘d sit together and smoke cigarettes and talk about romantic poetry, and once again, it was just this sort of confidence he showed in me, confidence that I didn‘t have in myself that made him valuable.

LAMB: You mentioned smoking cigarettes, and it just brings to light what I read in your book, a lot of reference to taking of drugs.

KIRN: Yes.

LAMB: Were you a big drug user? KIRN: Well, I wouldn‘t like to think of myself as a big drug user in the sense that that takes money and I never had any, but there were a lot of drugs floating around Princeton University in 1980, and where they floated I often floated with them.

LAMB: What kind of drugs? KIRN: A lot of you know marijuana, LSD. It was almost like 1980 was the tail end of the 60s, and there was still a kind of psychedelic culture at Princeton, people who followed and listened to the Grateful Dead and a sort of hippy culture, and that‘s the kind of drug use that I was exposed to you know.

LAMB: How extensive was it?

KIRN: Fairly extensive. Princeton was a strange institution in 1980, and this has come out I think a little bit with Sonia Sotomayor you know that place had only recently admitted women about 10 years before I got there, and I happen to know from my reading about the history of Ivy League admissions had really only started letting in students who weren‘t to the manor born about 15 years before, and so you had a college and a campus that was still kind of dominated by what you might call the blue blood, upper-class inherited establishment of America. But into it were coming people who had done very well on SAT tests, people of different races and ethnic backgrounds, and they didn‘t mix all that well, and so there was a lot of alienation at Princeton, and when there is alienation and unhappiness, there are drugs and other forms of bad behavior.

LAMB: Did you ever get caught using drugs? KIRN: No. But then again, Princeton was a largely unpoliced island. It reminds me of the island in Lord of the Flies, you know where the kids are shipwrecked or their plane crashes and then they just sort of revert to savagery. Well, Princeton was kind of like that. They brought all those bright kids in there and then sort of let us loose, and I wasn‘t aware of much supervision, even from afar.

LAMB: So go back to Mr. Rudenstine, who ended up being president of Harvard after being provost at Princeton. Did you win that..contest?

KIRN: Yes. I did win this Keasbey Fellowship. It was a very peculiar fellowship. The Rhodes asked you in interviews questions like what is the world‘s greatest problem, to which I answered ineptly communication and then gave an example that man and animal weren‘t communicating well. I knew I‘d lost it at that point. When I got to the Keasbey interviews, which are held in a law firm in Philadelphia and were meant to choose a different kind of American exemplar, which was the young gentlemen, they asked me did I like to take walks, which I said yes, and they asked me why I‘d gotten Ds on my Spanish test, and I said because I was drunk, and they all laughed because the manifesto behind the Keasbey was to take a young American and kind of send him to finishing school at Oxford rather than create a future president. And I fit the bill, strangely, because I was kind of a hapless, but I think improvable young man.

LAMB: So did Professor, Dr. Rudenstine, did he make the decision on the Keasbey himself? KIRN: Well, the Keasbey was only open to students who had gone to a few select universities, and so each of these universities selected a couple of candidates, and Rudenstine and the committee there selected me and the quarterback of the football team to be nominees for the Keasbey, and I never thought that I would beat out the quarterback of the football team for any distinction, but that‘s what happened.

LAMB: Let me go back and reconstruction dates the year you graduated from high school? KIRN: Well, I didn‘t graduate from high school. I took the SAT test and then was offered, because of the high score, immediate admission to Macalister College in St. Paul, which I went to after my junior year in high school, and then I transferred to Princeton in 1980.

LAMB: So how close to 1600 did you get on the SAT?

KIRN: Brian, this is an honest answer. My editor begged me over and over to find my SAT results and somehow put them in the front of the book, and I couldn‘t find them by hook or by crook, nor had I memorized them. But not as close as I think you‘d need to today to go to Princeton, would be my answer – I think around 15 or the high 14s.

LAMB: So when you ended up at Princeton, how old were you? KIRN: I was 17 – or no, I was 18. I went to college barely 17 at Macalister, and then when I transferred to Princeton I was just 18.

LAMB: And what year were you in Princeton? KIRN: I was a sophomore. They asked me to start again as a freshman, and I, being a kind of cocky kid, said I‘d rather not go if I had to be pushed back a year, and they relented.

LAMB: What year did you graduate from Princeton? KIRN: In 1983.

LAMB: What year did you do the Keasbey Oxford experience? KIRN: Eighty-three to ‘85 I was at Oxford. I did another undergraduate degree at Oxford.

LAMB: And your first full-time job? KIRN: My first full-time job was as a teacher of English as a second language at a kind of grungy, low-class business school in the Old Times Square in New York, where, for $10 and hour, I helped immigrants learn English, not very well because I didn‘t understand their languages. Then a Princeton classmate actually saw me living really hand-to-mouth in New York City about a year later, and she worked at Vanity Fair Magazine and said ”Walter, what are you doing? You know you‘re worth so much more than this. Come on over to Vanity Fair. We‘ll get you a job,” and she did.

LAMB: And what did you do at Vanity Fair? KIRN: Brought bagels and coffee to the superior editors and wrote clever headlines for stories.

LAMB: So when did you first write, really write for a living? KIRN: I first wrote because I had a job as a result of having gone to Oxford, not unlike yours; interviewing American cultural figures for the BBC Radio back in England, and in New York I interviewed an American book editor, Gordon Lish, fiction editor, famed as the man who sort of made Raymond Carver a great name in American letters. And he said at the end of the interview you must have a short story or a book or something. Everybody does, and I didn‘t, but I lied and said yes, of course. He said, well, show it to me. So I went home that night to Astoria, Queens, started writing, wrote a short story in about a week, brought it to him, he liked it. He said write me 12 more of these and you‘ll have a book. I said ”Couldn‘t I have a contract of some kind?” he said ”You just got a contract. I just told you.” And on that oral agreement, I wrote my first book, a book of short stories and kept at it.

LAMB: What‘d you get paid for that, do you remember? KIRN: Three thousand dollars.

LAMB: That‘s all you made from that first …

KIRN: Three thousand dollars, yep.

LAMB: As you know, all politics is local, and that goes for us here. We were first introduced to you, surprisingly so, somebody I never heard of you in my life, and then at about 19 – I‘m not sure what date it was, I got the …

KIRN: Ninety-two or …

LAMB: Ninety-two or so …

KIRN: Probably.

LAMB: … Actually, the producer of this show dropped this magazine article on my desk, and she was somewhat incensed about what she read. I had a different reaction, but I want to read it back to you. I don‘t know whether you remember this or not …

KIRN: I remember writing it, and I remember the sentiments, but I do not remember the sentences.

LAMB: OK, I just want to read because I want you to tell me where you think the world‘s gone since you wrote this.

KIRN: Oh, sure.

LAMB: The headline on it is ”REM-TV,” and here is the way it started; ”If television is a plug-in drug, then C-SPAN is the antidote, the network to watch when you want to come down. The programs are shot in color, but might as well be in black and white. There are no commercials. The almost total lack of editing and super-sluggish camera work create a world as flat and inert as a mid-level bureaucrat‘s desktop. The sets, when sets are used, are nonsense, a book line den or a featureless black box. The earnest polyester host,” that‘d be me, ”make Brokaw seem like Errol Flynn, and the classical music played during breaks reminds you of those untitled cassettes used to demonstrate Oldsmobile car stereos.” I‘ve never had a chance to talk to you about this, but what ...

KIRN: What goes around comes around, truly.

LAMB: Exactly. So what got you there, and why did you call it ”REM-TV”?

KIRN: Well, I mean I turned on C-SPAN at – my job was to comment on the media in a monthly fashion for this magazine.

LAMB: Mirabella Magazine.

KIRN: Yes, Mirabella, a now dead and gone fashion magazine, and I turned on C-SPAN and – well, I turned on the cable TV, and as I ran through the channels, there was only one really which aesthetically, sonically, visually did not resemble the others, and that was C-SPAN. They went fast; it went slow. They cut around; it stayed steady. They spoke loudly; it spoke softly, and it fascinated me. I mean it was like coming across a Buddhist at a holy-roller church service you know. Here was C-SPAN sitting quietly, deliberately doing its own thing in the midst of this new cacophony of cable TV, and it fascinated me.

LAMB: You also wrote, ”For everyone besides the target audience, the policy nerds and traction patients, the result was like watching the Watergate hearings minus the scandal that made them interesting. C-SPAN was that dead zone on the dial where middle-aged men with identical side parts stood, broke verbal wind and sat back down.”

KIRN: There I‘m referring to Congress.

LAMB: Yes, I understand. ”The proceedings had all the drama of a board game based on Robert‘s Rules of Order.”

KIRN: Well, you know I don‘t know that we, before C-SPAN had regular televised exposure to our legislative and deliberative processes, and once we did, I think we saw that in some sense they‘re both much less dramatic than we might imagine and somewhat soporific. I couldn‘t believe how empty the Chambers of Congress usually are, for example, and it was only C-SPAN that taught me that.

LAMB: Well, the reason I even bring it up is to ask you – I mean it‘s always, as you know all politics – always fun to hear somebody feed back to you what they‘re seeing.

KIRN: Right.

LAMB: You were watching us from Livingston at the time, is that …

KIRN: Yes. Yes.

LAMB: What‘s happened – you‘re an old media writer. What‘s happened to television since 1992, in your opinion? KIRN: Well, one of the things that happened is that C-SPAN has abided in a way that I think is sincerely a tribute to its mission and the sincerity and skill with which it‘s carried it out. A lot of things have come and gone, but these programs and these camera angles and these sort of settings that would not have appeared to be likely to hold the nation‘s attention have gone on and on. Around the eye of the storm that is C-SPAN, a lot has happened.

LAMB: Well, and in fairness, we‘re not the network that makes money, and we don‘t have to …

KIRN: Right.

LAMB: … deliver eyeballs to advertising. But I really was wondering what you think has happened since 1992 to the American audience, to what they like, what they you know what they go for? I mean we …

KIRN: It has grown progressively less serious, less nourishing intellectually. It has grown in a linear fashion more superficial, sensationalist. It really does not take a genius to identify the trajectory of American television and pop entertainment, which is, if you are somewhat moralistic, straight down. That simple, really.

I mean I never thought that I‘d be watching network news or serious cable newscasts and see that 75 percent of them are taken up with discussions of Brittany Spears‘ mothering or you know a woman who had eight kids and whether or not she‘s a good person, et cetera. I mean when Patty Cheski (ph) wrote network that visionary satire of TV news, he had no idea that he would be raised and double raised by reality, and that‘s exactly what‘s happened.

LAMB: You‘ve written six fiction books.

KIRN: Yes.

LAMB: We obviously don‘t have time to talk about all of them, but just give me just a sentence on each one of them so we have an idea of what they were about, The Unbinding.

KIRN: ”The Unbinding” was a book that I wrote on Slate.com as a serial novel without knowing the ending, and it‘s about the way in which the Internet, things like Facebook, MySpace, now Twitter, have separated people and their identities, have taken away the power from traditional institutions and put us in a sort of wilderness of communication and exhibitionism and surveillance of each other that has I think confused our social relationships. That‘s the theme of that book.

LAMB: ”Mission to America.”

KIRN: ”Mission to America” is about a 19th Century religious cult which I think manifests many of the 19th Century utopian ideals of America, which I pretend has survived unscathed in the mountains of Montana and then sends out two sort of trapped in time, Rip Van Winkle-ish missionaries to look at the America of 2005 or now.

LAMB: Any religion in mind there? KIRN: It – the religion was a combination of Seventh-Day Adventism, Christian Science, Mormonism, et cetera, et cetera. They‘re appalled by how poorly we eat. That‘s one of the things that strikes them.

LAMB: The book called ”Up in the Air.”

KIRN: ”Up in the Air,” which is being made into a movie, is going to be out this fall starring George Clooney, directed by Jason Reitman, the guy who did the movie Juno, is a book about a corporate management consultant who specializes in firing people, terminating executives, and whose heart and life are so empty that he has only one preoccupation in life, which is collecting frequent flier miles.

LAMB: Where‘d you get that idea? KIRN: I met a guy on a plane. I was sitting in first class. I asked him where he was from. I said I‘m from Minnesota. I asked him where he was from. He said this seat. And I said what do you mean, and he said I‘m from seat 3-C. I used to have an apartment in Atlanta, but I gave it up. I stay in hotels for a month at a time. All my stuff‘s in storage, and I live in airports, airplanes and Marriotts.

LAMB: And did you get a nice, long conversation before it was over? KIRN: Yes, I did. Yes, ”Up in the Air” is told from the point of view of that person you never want to meet, the airplane talker, and yes. I met a guy who I think exemplified a lot of the trends of the time for transients and sort of disconnected motion for its own sake.

LAMB: Have you ever seen him again? Does he know you wrote a book about him? KIRN: No, but I know he‘s up there.

LAMB: ”Thumb Sucker.”

KIRN: ”Thumb Sucker” is a autobiographical novel about growing up in the – I set it in the 80s, but I actually grew up in the 70s. And I had a terrible, unbreakable thumb-sucking habit, which caused me great distress and psychological and emotional pain, and it‘s really just a true story of a boy like that in you know 80s Minnesota, and that was made into a movie too a few years ago.

LAMB: How long did you suck your thumb? KIRN: Till I was 17 years old. LAMB: How did you break it? KIRN: I think just general shame and mortification at the thought of girls I liked seeing me do it finally got me to stop. But thumb sucking in the book is a metaphor for all kinds of things that make us feel you know different or outside you know a lot of – I had a lot of gay fans for ”Thumb Sucker” who saw it as a metaphor for being gay. I had other people who saw it as a metaphor for being ethnically different.

LAMB: So just check in on a couple of things. Your mom and dad, are they still alive? KIRN: Mom is – they‘re both still alive. Mom lives in a town I grew up in Minnesota.

LAMB: Marine, Minnesota.

KIRN: Marine, Minnesota. Dad – they‘re divorced. Dad lives near where I live. He retired coincidentally to a place in the mountains near Livingston, Montana.

LAMB: What‘s your relationship with both of them now? KIRN: Pretty good. I mean they have a son who‘s a writer, so it tends to fray a little at – around publication time you know because I use my life, quite frankly, even in my fiction, and here in my nonfiction I‘ve used it literally, and you know whoa betide the parent who has a son who wants to be a memoirist, I guess.

LAMB: And how old are your parents? KIRN: My dad‘s 70, and my mom‘s 69.

LAMB: Are they still working? KIRN: My dad is retired, and my mom, who was a nurse at Hazelton, the rehab in Minnesota, she‘s retired too, yes.

LAMB: Next novel is She Needed Me, and about what year did you write that? KIRN: That was ‘92. That‘s about abortion.

LAMB: That‘s about the time you were trashing C-SPAN.

KIRN: Yes, well, you know I don‘t know that I trashed C-SPAN.

LAMB: No, you didn‘t I was kidding.

KIRN: I think at the end I sort of turned it around, but …

LAMB: No, it was a very – frankly, it was a very humorous piece.

KIRN: Yes. You know at least I spelled your name right. But She Needed Me was set in the anti-abortion community, I guess. It was a book about a right to life young man trying to convince a young woman not to have an abortion, and it dealt with what they would now call the culture wars, I suppose.

LAMB: And the last one is ”My Hard Bargain”. What year was that? KIRN: That was the first book, and that was the book of short stories, and the themes of those stories were Mormonism, this sort of crisis in rural life, the decline of family agriculture, all really sexy topics guaranteed to sell thousands of books.

LAMB: So which one of all of these – I know you got them, two movies out of them, but which one of all of these was the biggest seller? KIRN: I think ”Up in the Air.” But ”Up in the Air” was a peculiar book. It was really a book that was trying to grapple and published in 2001 with a society that was starting to become infatuated with mobile phones, business travel, technology and so on, and it was set in airplanes and airports and had the misfortune of being published about two months before 9-11 happened, and it sold very well until 9-11. But its cover showed a bunch of businessmen flying around like airplanes and one of them crashing in flames to the ground, and it didn‘t sit well, you know given what happened, and its sales crashed too.

LAMB: So going back to your mom for a moment, Hazelton, well known drug treatment center.

KIRN: Yes.

LAMB: Any irony there about your drug use and – I mean did your – how did your mom deal with? Did she even know you were using drugs? KIRN: Well, I was away at Princeton. She had no idea. Yes, there‘s irony. I mean there‘s even greater irony in the fact I was born in the hospital in Akron, Ohio where Alcoholics Anonymous was spawned, and AA and Hazelton were intrinsically linked. Hazelton was a great publisher of anti-addiction literature and still is. I guess it shows that anything can happen to anyone anywhere, but yes, plenty of irony.

LAMB: In your book, you also have a couple of notes upfront and where you just kind of – you quote a couple of people. First one is John Ashbery from the Ice Storm. First of all, what is that? KIRN: Ice Storm is a poem.

LAMB: ”I tell myself it all means like fun and will work out in the end. I expect I will be asked a question I can answer and then be handed a big prize. They‘re working on it.”

KIRN: Well, that quote to me sort of manifests a thought that I always had in the back of my head as a kid, as a young student, which was that at the end of this getting of As, at the end of this winning of golden stars, there was going to be some celebration of Walter Kirn, and I don‘t know what it was really that was motivating me as a kid except a kind of generic need for approval, and probably love, and so that little excerpt speaks to that, I think.

LAMB: Were you an only child? KIRN: No, I was an older child.

LAMB: How many are there in the family? KIRN: Two. My brother‘s about a year-and-a-half younger than I.

LAMB: Where is he? KIRN: He‘s in St. Paul, Minnesota. He works as a paralegal for a financial firm.

LAMB: Then you quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, ”I see now that this has been a story of the West; after all, Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

KIRN: Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in a house – not grew up in a house not far from Macalister College. I actually saw that house, so I was very aware of him as being Minnesota‘s great writer, and of course his greatest book, The Great Gatsby, is about Midwesterners who come to the East in fashion, new and sort of tragically grandiose identities for themselves in an attempt to fit in the American class system. That was appropriate to my book because my experience in going to Princeton was similarly disastrous and ran along similar themes.

I wanted desperately to be accepted by what I perceived to be, for the first time, a real American hierarchy and establishment to which I did not have the keys and whose acceptance I craved but whose presence and whose power I also resented, and that made for a kind of a very difficult psychological state while I was in Princeton because I realized that Princeton was not chiefly about learning academic subjects. It was about learning the American – the lay of the American land socially.

LAMB: Describe Princeton. Where is it and how big is it? What‘s the feel you have when you‘re on the campus? KIRN: Princeton is an island of squirrels and overly-manicured grass, pseudo-gothic buildings in suburban New Jersey, far from the matting crowd, and it is a society unto itself. It‘s not like Yale integrated into a city or Harvard. It‘s a kind of monastic institution where students live out an allegedly idealic existence, lounging around, you know enjoying their drinks on the weekend, partying and growing into what Princeton likes to think are very well-rounded American comers, and you know they tend to go out into you know as most Ivy League students do, into finance, government, business and so on. But Princeton is a small campus for the Ivy Leagues. It doesn‘t have big graduate schools, law school, medical school. It‘s chiefly an undergraduate institution, and it‘s a place where you‘re supposed to be happy all the time and wave the pendant and go to the football game and really shut up if you‘re not happy, and I couldn‘t shut up for my whole life, but I had to at the time.

LAMB: What did your education cost you? KIRN: Well, it‘s hard to say. I had a National Merits Scholarship due to my performance on the SAT, which defrayed some of it, and there was some other loans and so on, but my parents paid for a lot of it. I think at the time it was $20-something thousand a year. I have no idea what it costs now, and frankly I‘ve become a little bit of an activist on this subject.

I can‘t understand why these places, with these endowments that have grown to the size of you know small country GDPs should be so expensive and so insular still. I think for example Princeton philosophy lectures should be on the web. I think that these wonderfully concentrated islands of talent and wealth and erudition should be opened up to the larger society, not cultishly kept separate, which they still are, and I can‘t understand why.

LAMB: I want to read a paragraph from your book, ”Lost in the Meritocracy.” This is about page 122, ”I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too were fakes. In classroom discussions and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, who‘s patient, sedentary study habits and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated, appeared unsuited to the new attitude of anti-coast modernism that I had mastered almost without effort. To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I, a born conman, who knew little about great literature, had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability, the nonreader was king, it seemed. Long live the king.” Break that paragraph down.

KIRN: Well, when I was at Princeton, the fashion in literary and art studies was something called deconstructionism, which was a European school of literary and art criticism, which taught that words and great masterpieces of writing were really these sort of stealth instruments of the ruling class meant to keep people in awe of traditional institutions, women subjugated by men, colonials subjugated by imperialists, and their content – their supposed – their what had been alleged to be their greatness in the past, was really dubious and something to be resisted.

And so here I was coming from a little published school in Minnesota thinking I was going to come read the classics, and I got there only to find out that the classics were kind of unjustly revered and positively malignant in some political sense, some people felt. And so you know I guess I say somewhere in the book I went straight from ignorance to revisionism, as far as literary studies went.

LAMB: What kind of a breakdown did you really have? KIRN: Well, I had – I had a breakdown, which is described in the book, and people have said you know do you exaggerate, and I say, ”No, I minimize.” What happened to me was I was sitting in a lecture one day, and between the drugs, between the sort of fatigue of keeping up and trying to keep up socially, intellectually and academically, I just lost the ability to kind of process information. Words became nonsense.

I couldn‘t understand what was being talked about at the blackboard. I kind of lost the ability to read. Words swam in front of my eyes. I couldn‘t write. Every essay I had to write became some infernal crossword puzzle that I couldn‘t complete, and it really was a matter of months after this breakdown before I could carry on as a student. In the meantime, I sort of B-S‘d my way through and hid and dodged, and it was possible to do that. So …

LAMB: How long did it take to recover? KIRN: It took months. I got a job in the Firestone Library, the main library at Princeton, reshelving books. They‘d – they were moving a whole floor of books to a whole other floor, and you know we had a break every half hour and we could sit down and read for five minutes, and between reading the dictionary – I mean really doing the ABC dictionary reading course that we sometimes joke about and reading in this library over the summer, I kind of got some traction again mentally. But it was a big slide.

LAMB: In the end, how did you finish in your class and grades and all that? I know you got a D in Spanish, but …

KIRN: I have two Ds in Spanish. I graduated summa cum laude from Princeton.

LAMB: What does that mean? KIRN: It means with highest honors, but it was – that designation was based on my performance in my senior thesis, which was a collection of 13 poems that were exactly 13 pages long. I remember Joyce Carol Oates coming up to me and seeing me with my bound thesis about to turn it in, and she said it‘s a bit slim, isn‘t it? And so because those poems were you know given good grades, I got a very high designation as a graduate. But you know I prevailed in the end, and I think I probably always knew I would because I was so desperate too. But, the knocks along the way were profound.

LAMB: Have you been back? KIRN: I‘ve been back once, and I was back about two years ago as I was finishing the book, and it was an astonishing experience, actually.

LAMB: Why? KIRN: Because in the years since I‘ve been at Princeton, they have received massive gifts from some of our new industrialists, like Meg Whitman, for example, who endowed something called Whitman College, a guy named Peter Louis and Progressive Insurance who has given $100 million or more to their art center, and they have built, without having anymore students, these massive edifices in praise of these donors, and the campus is that much more splendid and imposing, and yet there are still the same number of students, and the basic mission is still the same, which is to get them to read some good books, and I‘m a little appalled by the outsized nature of Princeton‘s physical plant compared to the you know ongoing nature of its academic mission, which is at somewhat at the same level. These places remind me of modern cathedrals that donors would build wings on hoping they‘d go to heaven. They‘re getting larger and larger, but their presence in society and their virtue that they‘re adding to our society has not grown in proportion.

LAMB: Our guest has been Walter Kirn. The book is ”Lost in the Meritocracy,” a memoir, and we thank you for joining us.

KIRN: Thank you very much.

END