RaveThe New YorkerThe title The Education of Henry Adams recalls novels like The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. But its structure reverses the classic formula of a charismatic nobody rewarded, in a final turn, with his rightful wealth and pedigree. \'Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he,\' Adams writes of himself. Just like that, one very useful narrative structure, that of adversity overcome, is ruled out. Instead, Adams tells the story of failing up: he notes, with each unearned success, the bankruptcy of the very distinction between winning and losing ... The pace of the book in its early chapters implies an even distribution of these life incidents across its length, as in a conventional autobiography. But The Education is not conventional, and not even quite an autobiography. Adams usually refers to himself in the third person, adding a grand study of failure to the library of volumes written about his family’s legendary statesmen. Adams saw himself as a passenger in his life, riding his own name ... And so we have, in his book, the eerie double exposure of a person from the distant past almost stepping on our toes as he describes the technological future. \'After so many years of effort to find one’s drift,\' Adams writes, \'the drift found the seeker, and slowly swept him forward and back, with a steady progress oceanwards.\' When I read the last chapters of the book, I always think of another great work that ends with a delegate of historical time gazing at his own obsolescence: Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Henry Adams, who considered himself \'a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,\' who washed ashore in the twentieth, knew that he’d glimpsed our world.
