"Meritocracy is a dramatic, riveting novel of our times."—Elizabeth Hardwick

It is the end of the summer of 1966 and a small group of friends, recent Yale graduates, gather in a Maine summer cottage to say good-bye to one of their own, Harry Nolan, who is joining the Army. Harry and his bride Sascha represent to their friends the apex of their generation. Sascha has men falling for her "up and down the eastern seaboard," and Harry, a rich and fearless Californian, son of a senator, has his friends convinced that he will one day be president. That is, until their love and Harry's ambition unleash a spiral of events that becomes as fateful for all the characters as it is emblematic of the times they grew up in. Meritocracy is the story of a generation when it was young, caught at the moment when history arrived to exact a tragic and inevitable price.