Made deeply uneasy by the entitlement of America’s ruling class — an entitlement he himself took for granted as a child — [McDonell] doesn’t have any extraordinary insight into why things are the way they are, or how they might be made otherwise ... In the end, the book’s interrogation feels directed more inward than outward.
[An] exploration of privilege and what it means both to be part of the 1 percent and, just as critically, to be part of the other 99 percent and how the system works to keep the offspring in their respective slots ... A journalist who wrote about meritocracy once observed that the more successful the people he interviewed, the more he found that they believed fervently that they lived in a meritocracy. In delicate, persuasive, and beautiful prose, McDonell blows the notion of meritocracy sky-high.
A reckoning with [McDonelll's] own privileged upbringing ... The vacillation in these moments—between grandiosity and remorse—is probably inherent to the project. McDonell is trying to write from two distinct urges, to confess his own feelings and to expose the lives of others ... But when McDonell switches from getting something out of his system to trying to expose the system, I occasionally feel the edge of his perception going dull. Exposure requires a different animating force than confession: you have to be willing to piss people off. As a journalist, McDonell knows this, but I don’t think there’s much in Quiet Street that would ruffle the feathers of its own subjects.
