At about the same age, my friend Derek's father, a minister with a mischievous sense of humor who himself liked to observe, and indulge in, various benign snobberies, took me and Derek into a shopping-mall Waldenbooks and bought for me a copy of Paul Fussell's Class, a crueler, funnier, and more intellectually penetrating improvement on The Official Preppy Handbook. Class is different in that Fussell, by training a literary critic, is concerned not just with the upper class but also with the various lower classes ("upper middles," "upper proles," "low proles," and the like). He wants to describe the wardrobes and decors, and plumb the psyches and neuroses, of all Americans. What in Birnbach is always good fun—after all, whether mocking or exalting she is always writing about privileged white people—in Fussell is often like vivisection, performed not on pampered purebreds but on hapless, unwilling mutts.

[I was glad I graduated from a prep school before the Preppy Handbook came out. I never felt the slightest bit preppy then and still don't.]