![]() ![]() The kind of people that ran this country at one time. She, like his father, had come from a long line of wealthy and influential East Coasters. He talked about her life, her house and what it was that drove her. They asked for it.Kai Ryssdal: After Tad Friend’s mother died, he wrote a piece in the New Yorker magazine about her. Were his book only about the final sputterings of the gimlet class, the folk who brought us topsiders, country clubs, the Bushes and grownups with names like Paddy, Goggy, Dickie, Scooter, Muffie and, yes, Tad, it would be no easier to mourn the decline than to muster sympathy for George Armstrong Custer's headlong charge at Little Bighorn. To put it bluntly, this is how Friend makes us care. As with so much that is observed and recorded in this wry elegy for an expiring class, the smallest acts of intransigent Wasp ritual stand for the sinking of the whole damned ship. I was the youngest criminal in America, banging my cup on the bars."Ĭheerful Money takes its title from the Friend family practice of putting money away in jars for the rewarding of unpleasant tasks reluctantly but stoically accomplished – things done because they must be done, and done in the only way tradition permits them to. Between Mom and me, almost always, were the palings of baby gates and playpens. "I remember resting my head on mullioned blocks of morning light on the floor of the sun porch, tracing their outlines with my finger, square by square. "My earliest memories of my mother don't actually include her," he writes. For Friend, the earliest signs of his class's talent for self-barricading came from the cradle: The long, cocktail-hour sunset of Wasp dominion has in no small part been prolonged by the intoxicating fermentation of pure denial. The writer himself grew up steeped in family history and wrapped in Brooks Brothers suits, along with an increasingly unsettling awareness that the world beyond the various family summer estates and decorum-governed dining tables was leaking in through the ancient plumbing and rotting gables.īut there is certainly no more effective barrier against revelation than high garden walls. His mother finished second in a poetry-writing contest to Sylvia Plath. ![]() His mother's great-grandfather scored the highest grades in Yale's history. Another rode herd over the Union Army during the Civil War. One of his ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence. It is also why they are doomed.įriend's own family is literally one for the books. It is also why they tend to abhor change and monitor the intrusion of unwanted cultural influences at their country clubs. This is why they tend to dress the same, speak the same, frequent the same schools and summer at the same family compounds. Bean to the north, the shingle style to the east, Robert Falcon Scott's doomed polar expedition to the south and the limits of Horace Greeley's optimism to the west."Īs tradition was their primary form of both defence and definition, the dyed-in-the-Shetland-wool Wasps were genetically predisposed to live in the past, a habit of attitude that bolstered the present while blithely ignoring the future. "They lived in a floating Ruritania loosely bounded by L.L. "My family and their friends, as Wasps, were circumscribed less by skin tone and religion than by a set of traditions and expectations: a cast of mind," he explains. We're talking of that race of blue-bloodhounds that can trace its lineage along lines of privilege, historical influence and presumed superiority so far back that it seems to have leapt from nature itself as if the Wasps always were, paddling the primordial soup with silver spoons. The Wasp isn't just any white person of vaguely but probably Anglo Saxon Protestant background – in this book, a white-skinned, working-class mutt like myself would hardly qualify. Helpfully, Friend – a New Yorker staffer who writes with irresistible humour and unsparing candour – defines the creature that has been both so profoundly misunderstood and for the most part, unmysteriously unmourned. ![]() For the true Wasp, it's time to make ice cubes. If the old-money American Wasp is about to go – or has already gone – the way of so many other ill-adapted swaggering colossi, it is a condition of its survival thus far that the endangered sees the coming Ice Age as no threat. While the class in question is unquestionably on the brink of oblivion – Friend calls this the final moments of a "long swoon" – a certain kind of obliviousness brought it there. The almost extinct species described by Tad Friend in Cheerful Money is his own: the privileged, old-family Wasp. ![]()
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