What is Erich Segal's "The Class" about?

Answer 1

Read this reaction I came across on the web:
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I was given ’The Class’ on the eve of my departure to Harvard Law School. My generous friend told me that, although the book kept a middle way between litterature and a paperback soap opera, it was a must for any future Harvard guy. She was right, I noticed, when finishing part 1 (’’College Years’’) the night before graduating myself, and finishing everything else (’’Real Life’’ and the part on the 25th Year Reunion) when my own ’real life’ had kickedoff again - in the form of the New York Bar exam preparations (more real impossible).
The book made me discover lots of new and hidden places on the Harvard campus, and finally spurred me to identify some of those stately houses with their funny little towers with coloured dome like roofs (Eliot House, Dunster House etc.). Admittedly, some of the characters are a bit predictable or what we in 2003 might call stunningly oldfashioned, but then again it’s supposed to be a portrait of people graduating in 1958, isn’t it? Overall, the analysis and ’deconstruction’ of the notion of success is marvelously subtle. And some evolutions in society in a key period of 20th century history (Cold War strategies, women’s emancipation, mass media and the arts,...) are really well portrayed through some of the main characters. Each time you think you’ve pinned down Segal on some ideological position (’’a Republican’’? ’’a male chauvinist’’?), his narration takes some turns that can only make you conclude you were wrong.
There’s one exception to that, however, which kept me puzzled about one character: Jason Gilbert, and the very strong pro-Israeli stand in the background of the novel he embodies. When Segal writes merely about ’’Arabs’’, and calls these people Palestinians only when depicting them as perpetrators of large scale terrorist attacks, makes my hair raise in anger! Equally so does his further uncommented statement after his account of the 1967 war, that a national liberation movement started ’’for a people that had never been a nation’’. How can one say something like that in such a gratuitous way, even for the purpose of a novel? When even the Old Testament itself speaks of ’’Filistinians’’ against whom Samson battled, how can one deny nationhood to a people just with a stroke of a novelist pen? Segal seems to ask, in the longer run, for a similar fate for his ’’Class’’ as ’’Gone With The Wind’’, which because of its overtly racist tone seems so misplaced and out of date for present day readers - even when continuing to be a best-seller. I can only hope that, in 2003, Segal’s statement sounded as bizarre and revisionist to every one else who read the book as it did to me. It also kept me from enjoying the the unnuanced praise at the address of the Israeli defense forces in which Jason Gilbert takes part (who bothers about the two fairly innocent Ugandan airport guards ’’silenced’’ by Israeli guns in a totally internationally illegal operation, for instance? Segal’s ’’sorrow’’ about human losses seems at least not to be including their fate...). And it kept me puzzled as to why every single interlocutor in the book seems to consider Gilbert as a hero having ’’died for a cause in which he believed’’. Surely, protecting the homeland of a historically oppressed people like the Jews is in itself a noble cause, and liberating hostages as well. But then again, Segal’s portraying of the Middle East conflicts is so biased as if it seems that there are no other legitimate interests, claims or people in the region. And it is hard to see how Gilbert’s struggle, after all essentially and purely motivated by a thirst for vengeance for his killed girlfriend, necessarily needs to be that unequivocally elevated to be a ’’noble cause’’. Sorry, Erich Segal, but being Jewish is no excuse.

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