Success story …

… I Should Have Made Him for a Dentist’. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The “I” of Making It is a character we have never exactly met before. The outlines of his story are familiar: a precocious, poetry-writing boy, the son of poor, Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Brownsville, Brooklyn, rises above his origins and becomes a person to be reckoned with in the larger culture. But the particulars are unusual, a little mysterious. Norman—as I will call him to distinguish him from his creator, Podhoretz—is not the conventional changeling who doesn’t belong with the Muggles he has been set down among. He is content with his lot. He is bookish and precocious, yes, but being the smartest boy in the class doesn’t ruin his life.