The Endless Tryout (Reclaiming Childhood from Relentless Competition)

From New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang, a provocative, mordantly funny, autobiographical rejection of the toxic competitiveness that has come to define the lives of American parents and children alike—and a search for a better way for all

Every year, the rat race begins earlier and earlier for the next generation of American kids. Parents hustle ever-younger—and increasingly anxious—children from one extracurricular and afterschool activity to another. The financial cost of soccer practice, Kumon, or ballet lessons keeps rising. But the apparent social costs of not building a differentiated résumé for an eight-year-old seem to rise even faster. Otherwise, what hopes are there for a spot at the “right” educational institution later in life? American parents white-knuckle their way through a hierarchical game that seemingly cannot be won, only lost. Running this gauntlet, the middleclass—far removed from the lives of the ultrarich who always have on hand consultants and tutors—will jettison their stated political ideals and commitments in the blink of an eye, if it means their kids have a fractionally better shot with the admissions office. Who built this Hunger Games-style arena of personal development? And—as most measures of mental health for parents and kids deteriorate further—whose interests does it serve, if anyone? Jay Caspian Kang, for one, has had enough.

In his distinctively thoughtful, hilarious, lacerating style—which has made his columns and op-eds for the New York Times and The New Yorker famous—Kang takes aim at this culture of competition, optimization, and hypocrisy, pointing the finger with as much ferocity at himself as at the rest of us. He writes with startling candor about his precocious eight-year-old daughter, Frankie, and their adventures together in the baroque world of youth soccer. He skewers the affected and overwrought milieu, in which he, a writer for legacy media outlets, and his family finds themselves as a card-carrying members of the so-called “coastal elite,” having relocated from Brooklyn to Berkeley. And he confronts the intractable dilemma of “screen time,” and its attendant alienation, with sangfroid and a spirit of pragmatism.

At once an accusation and a confession, The Endless Tryout promises both catharsis and salvation for parents at the end of their rope. In his inimitable voice, Kang captures like no one has before the special hybrid of panic and cruel calculation that gives American parenting its uniquely stressed-out emotional texture. At heart, his book is a desperately creative attempt to imagine a better—no less high-achieving but more realistic, honorable, and humane—world for parents and children alike, as well as a love letter to his own kids. For Frankie and her little brother, Anzan, he would do or sacrifice anything—including his dignity and reputation.