By Michael Alison Chandler, Published: September 15
SAT reading scores for graduating high school seniors this year reached the lowest point in nearly four decades, reflecting a steady decline in performance in that subject on the college admissions test, the College Board reported Wednesday.
In the Washington area, one of the nation’s leading producers of college-bound students, educators were scrambling to understand double-digit drops in test scores in Montgomery and Prince William counties and elsewhere.
“Once you hit a certain mark, you want to maintain that,” said Frieda Lacey, deputy superintendent for Montgomery schools. “Don’t think the decline didn’t bother us. It really did.”
Nationally, the reading score for the Class of 2011, including public- and private-school students, was 497, down three points from the previous year and 33 points from 1972, the earliest year for which comparisons are possible. The average math score was 514, down one point from last year but up five from 1972.
The Egyptian revolution is over, the army wields power and the new government is in disarray. Tensions between Christians and Muslims are ascendant and members of the elite are leaving the country in droves while those who remain bemoan the masses as ignorant ideologues. This is the Egypt of Waguih Ghali’s “Beer in the Snooker Club,” a coming-of-age novel set in 1952 that, much like “The Catcher in the Rye” in America, articulated the identity crisis of a generation. Ghali’s characters — young, precocious, cosmopolitan — are lost in the bewildering aftermath of the military coup that overthrew the pliant boy-king Farouk. They pine for the easeful gambling, womanizing and drinking of the past even as they scorn both the ancien régime’s sordid pretensions and the new regime’s inability to deliver on its vaulted promises; “We have the worst of both systems,” one of them declares, exasperated. Ghali, who published his novel in 1964 and committed suicide five years later in the bathtub of his British editor’s Primrose Hill apartment, took the fall of the monarchy as his subject. Still, his tale presents uncanny parallels to today’s Egypt, where artists, intellectuals and youth at large are beginning to fashion a new cultural republic of sorts even as they also struggle to find their bearings.
Under Mubarak, the Egyptian literary scene, long the center of the Arab cultural universe, floundered. While the state remained the primary patron of Egyptian literature, absorbing and co-opting anyone it possibly could, many authors escaped prickly Egyptian censors by publishing their books in more lenient Lebanon. Meanwhile, plush literary foundations and glittering prizes popped up in the much wealthier gulf countries. Still, there were pockets of activity. In the late 1990s, a former journalist named Mohamed Hashem founded Merit, a publisher credited with nurturing a new Egyptian avant-garde. Merit published Alaa al-Aswany, the dentist turned literary star whose “Yacoubian Building” captured the jaded grandeur of downtown Cairo. It also put out Ahmed Alaidy, whose stories of youthful mall culture used a vernacular Arabic — complete with text messages — that challenged the high orthodoxy of classical Arabic, and Khaled al-Berry, who skillfully narrated his experiences as a teenage jihadist in “Life Is More Beautiful Than Paradise.”
Ali Smith loves words. She loves playing with them, calling attention to them, listening to them as if they were members of a vast extended family, each precious in its own right and she their fair-minded parent, determined not to play favorites. She can give the word “but” such a star turn that you wonder why you’d ever taken it for granted.
Smith’s love of language lights up all her books, a body of work that encompasses four previous novels and four volumes of short stories, and that has garnered prizes including the Whitbread Award in Britain. But (Oh there it is! As one of Smith’s characters says, “The thing I particularly like about the word but . . . is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting”) Smith’s wordplay never comes at the expense of the many other facets in her complicated creations — characters, places, ideas.
Smith’s new novel, “There but for the,” is a witty, provocative urban fable about an unexpected guest who shows up at a dinner party in the London suburb of Greenwich and then, midway through, locks himself inside the guest bedroom and refuses to leave. The novel is divided into four main sections, “There,” “But,” “For” and “The,” though the title phrase is nowhere spoken, leaving us to wonder which “There” Smith is referring to, and whether she intends for her readers’ minds to echo with the phrase “Grace of God Go I” — and if so, which God and, for that matter, which I. Such uncertainties typify Smith’s sly and circuitous method. She is not a writer to seize on if linearity and a clear plotline are what you’re after. On the other hand, if you enjoy surprising, often comic insights into contemporary life, she’s someone to relish.
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