These stories have been getting sharper and sharper! There’s something in this voice that is really good. Cynical, but not nihilistic—still willing to believe in something, though often disappointed.

In fact this story is about precisely that desire, on the narrator’s part, to believe in the tale that a classmate spun around herself:

My friends in law school often complain that I’m never impressed by anything. I’m bored by cognitive horsepower and status; I’m only weak for mind-beauty, which can come in that constellation or not. But listen: there’s a moment in Pnin that I find excruciating. At a faculty party, a grad student named Betty is informed that a professor received a grant of $10,000. A simple girl, she makes a grimace that conveys, as Nabokov describes it, awed recognition of such grand things as dining with one’s boss, being in Who’s Who, or meeting a duchess.

I winced so hard reading that. I spent my entire childhood like that, so easily awed. I don’t think there’s anything quite like going from a family of Bettys, straight to Stanford University. To be sure, I had an off-ramp in terms of my socialisation — I had a scholarship to a private high school, where I got studiously ignored by blonde girls with families that owned a car dealership. But Stanford is on a different level. You talk to some guy about Bon Iver, then you find out that guy’s dad is worth $5 billion. You wonder why this girl has such good weed, then you find out her dad has an Academy Award. You watch two kids from your freshman year dorm go on their first date — to the Palo Alto Nobu. And you know deep in your heart that your mother used to clean hotel rooms.