ity the Class of 2006, whose summer romps were interrupted when the Division of Student Affairs, in all its divisional wisdom, plopped down upon them a summer reading assignment with the proud banner of "promoting intellectual discussion." Never just an A&E rag, Recess is ready and willing to jump into the desk chair ring. Freshmen, a word of advice: If Recess offers to do your work for you, kick back and let it flow like Cliff's Notes. A moment please, let me get my boots on before we wade through the Bogs of Oprah.
Ethan Canin's "The Palace Thief" is a story about cheating--rather, a story about letting cheating slide. Our narrator is a blustering and spiteful teacher named Hundert, nestled within a stuffy, elite prep school. His maxim: "It is critical for any man of import to understand his own insignificance before the sands of time."
Conflict arises when he comes across Sedgewick, a troublemaker with "the dangerous element of natural leadership." He catches the boy cheating in a trivia contest in front of the whole school and its rich WASPy families--including the boy's father, a senator. Although our narrator makes sure the kid loses, he nevertheless balks from exposing the fraud. The moral failure plagues him throughout the rest of his career. Decades later, the kid--now CEO-fabulous but still up to no good--reconvenes his entire class on a private resort island to restage the contest. Once more, the teacher catches him cheating, and once more lets him off the hook. When he finally does scrape together some integrity and tries to redeem himself, it's too late: The palace is already stolen (that's figurative, hot shot) with the fortunate son on his way to Washington to become a senator himself.
Canin's story has at times the sharp eye of a parable. The power process runs not on merit but in fact counter to it--that cheating in life is modus operandi, and the foppish routines of integrity ultimately break down in compromise. Strangely, the story has only a weary apprehension of this cheating. The senator-to-be was mischievous but not malicious, and the worst thing really said about him--something that could be redirected instantly toward our country's current leader--is that he was "blindly ignorant of history and therefore did not fear his role in it."
Instead it is the narrator, and the academy he uses for a crutch, who are the real chumps. Hundert's life is bloated with every clot of arcane insulation that so hopelessly mires academia in irrelevance. The poor sod even has myopia, a fact you should bring up in your discussion of symbolism, right after you cover tone and diction.
Certainly "The Palace Thief" has an odd lesson to teach the Class of 2006, but it's one they'll learn well in the next couple of years. They'll know three or four kids in each dorm just as privileged, bratty and ethically bankrupt as Sedgewick--tomorrow's leaders who will sled down a Public Policy curriculum at a speed of 3.8 GPA, right into a cushy job controlling other people's money. Maybe not all of them have cheat-sheets taped to their shoe soles, but they still stand as damning evidence that an institution like Duke is just as much one of higher power as it is higher learning. In "The Palace Thief," academic integrity and excellence are as cheap as those framed Honor Code flyers on classroom walls.
How's that for a discussion topic?
Top three things to say about Thief to your peers:
3) "The tone that Canin utilisizes emphasizes the obscurity of his obsolete diction."
2) "The osteoporosis in the scapula could become gangrenous when Sedgewick effervescently obfuscates."
1) "Hundert's embers of learning accentuate Sedgewick's sparks of success."
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