A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League.

How a boy from Southeast D.C. made it to the Ivy League 

Four years ago, Ron Suskind published an extraordinary account of inner-city life in The Wall Street Journal The angle was simple, but novel: to document the peer pressure and other difficulties faced by a black honors student in a tough ghetto high school where academic success was seen by other students as a betrayal of group identity -- an affront to a prevailing culture that disdained any aspiration to rise out of poverty as "acting white."

For his subject, Suskind chose Cedric Jennings, a 16 year-old would-be scientist whose father was a thief and a drug dealer and whose mother, a former welfare recipient, had dedicated most of her adult life to plotting her son's escape from the underclass. The setting was Ballou High School, "the most troubled and violent school in the blighted Southeast comer of Washington, D.C.," an obstacle course where Cedric learned to avoid going to honors assemblies lest the prizes he accept incite violence against him.

The article turned Cedric's plight into a narrative of excruciating suspense: Would Cedric propel himself out of his poisonous environment, or would he fall victim to what's been tagged the "crab bucket syndrome," in which those who show the effrontery to seek escape are dragged back down by jealous peers? At the end of the first newspaper story (a follow-up appeared some months later, and both stories eventually won the Pulitzer prize), Suskind provided a hopeful answer: Cedric, receiving an acceptance letter to a summer science program for minority students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proclaimed, "My life is about to begin."

Now Suskind has turned the next few years of Cedric's story -- a disappointing performance at MIT, where his hopes for university admission were dashed; a perilous senior year at Ballou, where his MIT humiliation nearly caused him to give up; his turnaround acceptance to Brown; and the grinding struggle to integrate himself, academically and socially, into that alien, ivied campus -- into a book. When newspaper series are expanded into full-length nonfiction narratives, they often have a padded feel. A Hope in the Unseen, however, manages to enlarge the initial story not only by extending the narrative but by broadening its theme. Before, Suskind was telling the story of underclass barriers to success. Now, he's telling the story of affirmative action in the waning years of 20th-century America. The result deserves to win recognition as a classic of book-length narrative journalism.

A disclaimer: I worked for six years in the Washington bureau of The Wall Street Journal, where Suskind was a colleague and friend. (We've had almost no contact since I left the paper a little more than a year ago) Perhaps this biases me in favor of A Hope in the Unseen. Those who have met Suskind, though, know him to be a cocky and ebullient soul -- exactly the sort of person whose peers (including me) are loath to praise too highly, lest he become truly overbearing. In this case, however, there's no alternative, because the book is simply the best thing I've ever read about the confusing thicket of questions surrounding the preferential treatment of disadvantaged blacks.

That Cedric's path to the Ivy League was smoothed by special treatment is clear. He is not a pure, diamond-in-the-rough genius whose success, no matter what his environment, was guaranteed from birth. Such Einsteins have been known to exist from time to time, but obviously they're extremely rare, and their very freakishness guarantees that their stories wouldn't tell us much about the workings of American society. Cedric, Suskind makes plain, is quite smart, but his defining strength isn't intelligence but will. What's more, that will, while extraordinary, has been known to falter. In one of the book's more heartbreaking episodes, Cedric is tossed out of a magnet junior high school for becoming a minor discipline problem -- mostly talking back disrespectfully to teachers -- after a particularly painful visit with his father in prison. Cedric's expulsion means he won't be eligible to attend a magnet high school where college aspirations are the norm; instead, he!s banished to the Ballou crab bucket.

At Ballou, Cedric regains his resolve, but his experience at MIT shows that it isn!t enough to get him where he wants to go. Most of the kids in the minority program Cedric attends are from much wealthier backgrounds; their superior schools have left them much-better prepared for the programs academic rigors. The paradox, Suskind shows, is well known to the programs director, a retired black MIT graduate named Bill Ramsey. "When he first arrived, taking over a program that had been up and running for two decades, he had grand plans to find poor black and Hispanic kids from urban America -- kids who had somehow learned math and science in what are all but war zones -- and give them the boost," Suskind writes in one of the book's many interior monologues (all of them based on detailed interviews, he writes in an Author's Note). "Within his first year, he saw he'd been dreaming." Instead, Ramsey has redirected the program to benefit "polished middle- or upper-middle-class black and Hispanic kids -- leaders of tomorrow, all -- many of whom are here for little more than resume padding." Cedric is one of the "few twisted apples, poor kids from bad schools," who Ramsey sneaks in from time to time, and his performance steadily improves throughout the summer program. But not fast enough; in the end, Cedric is told by a white professor, "I don't think you're MIT material." Dazed, Cedric walks back to his dorm room, closes his eyes, and yells, "RACIST!"

Suskind provides no insider reporting on Brown's decision to accept Cedric, but it's reasonable to suspect the admissions officers were weighing Cedric's triumph over adversity -- which by then had been trumpeted in both the Journal and on ABCs "Nightline" -- over his mediocre SAT scores. If not for his status as a nationally known inspirational figure, it's quite possible Cedric would have had to settle for a second-tier college. That would hardly have been a tragedy, but given Cedric's fierce pride -- which Suskind doesn't flinch from portraying as occasionally annoying, even to teachers at Ballou who are trying to propel Cedric forward -- he might never have been able to overcome the humiliation. (For Cedric, even settling for Brown after setting his sights on MIT was fairly difficult)

In any case, Cedric was accepted to Brown, enabling Suskind to focus the last half of his book on the question: Does he belong? The answer eventually proves to be yes, but Cedric's struggles throughout his freshman year keep the outcome in doubt and enable Suskind to present a complex and wonderfully non-doctrinaire exploration of the question, largely from Cedric's point of view. In an arresting set-piece, Cedric is summoned for a visit with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who attempts to dispense useful advice while wrestling with his own demons. "I'm not sure if I would have selected an Ivy League school," Thomas says. "You're going to be up there with lots of very smart white kids, and if you're not sure about who you are you could get eaten alive."

On arriving at Brown, Cedric does indeed discover a whole world of unfamiliar cultural references that the other students have seemingly been swimming in since birth. In one especially poignant scene, Cedric sneaks a furtive look in the university bookstore at the jacket copy of a Winston Churchill biography so he can quickly master who that familiar-looking gentleman was; then it's on to the next anxiety. More striking than Cedric's academic challenges at Brown, which he eventually meets through hard work (and, Cedric would add, sustained religious faith) are Cedric's painful adjustments to the strange social terrain. Having been brought up in an environment where the smallest sexual dalliance or indulgence in alcohol or pot has consistently been shown to ruin lives, Cedric is amazed to observe that upper-middle-class white college students do these things all the time, in most instances suffering no discernible harm. Cedric's roomate, a white boy whose parents are doctors in Marblehead, Mass., appalls him with his untidiness. "Walking around in your bare feet," Cedric tells him. "That's disgusting." The roommate (whom Suskind calls Rob, bestowing one of a handful of pseudonyms used in the book) answers, "Cedric, everyone walks barefoot." The cultural gap between the two only widens with time, and by the end of the year the two are barely speaking. (Suskind writes in an epilogue that they patched it up the following year.)

Cedric forges a more successful friendship with another white boy, Zayd Osceola Ayers Dohrn, who shares Cedric's enthusiasm for cutting-edge urban music. Zayd turns out to be the son of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground fugitives-turned-Chicago-yuppies, whose chief (perhaps only) positive contribution to society, it seems, was raising an apparently bright, likeable, and empathetic child. Suskind portrays Dorhn, in particular, with gentle irony, and shows that even ex-radicals can make overbearing and embarrassing mothers. (At one point, she humiliates Zayd by using the word "fuck" in public on Parent's Weekend) A minor quibble: To my taste, Suskind downplays Dohrn's and Ayers' monstrous past too much, portraying it merely as outre Nowhere, for example, does he mention Dohrn's famous pronouncement about the Manson family: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach."

By the end of the book, Cedric is drifting into Brown's black clique, rejecting the warnings of Clarence Thomas ("Try to say to yourself, I'm not a black person, I'm just a persons") and his own, somewhat less doctrinaire, aspirations to integrate himself into the wider culture. Although Suskind as painted a mildly disapproving picture of Brown's army of multiculturalism facilitators -- who are shown constantly corralling students to discuss race and gender, and seem to ignore Cedric's tentative arguments against identity politics -- it seems inevitable that Cedric will end up befriending more blacks than whites as he becomes more sure about who he is. By this time, in any case, the reader feels certain that Cedric has undergone a transformation that has carried him out of the ghetto forever -- and that, despite whatever preferential treatment he's received, Cedric clearly belongs at Brown. Before you utter another word about affirmative action -- favorable or not -- please subject yourself to the pleasurable and edifying experience of reading this superb book.

Timothy Noah is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly and an assistant managing editor of U.S. News & World Report.