![]() But, drawn to "the ruinous romance of loss," Friend is one of the least whiny and most incisive insiders to chronicle this privileged world, and he does so with style and soul. Family estates, which once included a Pittsburgh mansion and a Vermont farm, are now reduced to a summer home on exclusive Georgica Pond on Long Island, which they rent to cover expenses.įriend is not the first to write about emotionally constipated ancestors, the waning of Wasp power or the painful erosion of beloved family holdings: George Howe Colt's The Big House springs to mind. Since the Great Depression, conservation and preservation have become the mainstays of the family, trying "to caulk the seams" of their leaky financial vessel. Paul's School and Yale, Friend diverged as far as Shipley and Harvard. While most of the men in his family attended St. His great-great grandfather employed 18 servants. His forebears came to America in the mid-17th century but didn't become "smashingly rich" - from steel, coal and banking - until the beginning of the 20th century. In a culture that values decorum and reticence, revealing private family matters requires gumption or, in Wasp-speak, "sand." Friend discovered that after his 2006 New Yorker profile of his late mother "rattled my family in ways that slowed the writing of this book yet clarified its true subject."īorn in 1962, Friend grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., and Swarthmore, Pa., where his father was president of Swarthmore College. ![]() Digby Baltzell, is both redundant and inexact, and he proceeds to delineate a more precise picture in his fond but probing personal history. He notes that the acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, popularized in 1964 by sociologist E. Using cash as a "behavioral-management tool" is just one Wasp peccadillo that Friend nails in Cheerful Money, a suave, sharp-witted, generally intoxicating but occasionally sobering expose of his native culture. Tad Friend's parents tried to entice their three children into "sunnier moods" with what they called "Cheerful Money," a 25-cent reward dropped into a glass jar whenever "one of us demonstrated good humor under duress or was spontaneously helpful." WASPs were “the most American of people,” Friend tells us, but they were fated to fall because they “failed at the most American necessity: assimilation.My husband's grandparents used to pay him a dollar an hour to nap. In the author’s mind, though, it’s too late for fighting, said Jessica Joffe in Bookforum. America wouldn’t be America without WASPs and their impulse toward stewardship, which Friend rightly describes as central to their ethic. Yet he’s used his first book to apologize for WASP culture, when he might have broken from the crowd to celebrate it. ![]() Friend is one of the few “transcendently gifted” prose craftsmen of his generation. The very beauty of the writing “annoys me” to no end, said Melik Kaylan in Forbes. “His account of losing his armor is straightforward, funny, and often moving.” What’s more, all of it is “gorgeously written.” Friend, now a staff writer at The New Yorker, doesn’t indulge in self-pity when examining where his own guardedness sprang from. But its broader theme is that “families are our fate.” Friend’s father was the president of Swarthmore College his mother was one of those well-bred types who learned to wear a mask of “hostile” cheerfulness. ![]() Cheerful Money is jolly with “summer houses, maids, private schools, and ditsy relatives,” and it offhandedly offers a convincing argument for why WASP culture collapsed in the mid-1960s. Predictable wardrobe.” I will never, he writes, “experience the pleasures of leather pants.” What made his particular cultural inheritance undeniable, though, was his realization that “I harbored a feeling of disconnection from my parents, as they had from their parents, and their parents had from their parents.” Something in the bloodline, something in “the amassed weight” of his ancestors’ expectations, caused almost every member of the family to shy from engaging fully in even life’s most cherished relationships.įriend may be a scion of this country’s faded elite, but “he has written a book for all of us,” said Jane Juska in the San Francisco Chronicle. ![]() One way Tad Friend recognized that he was a WASP was that the term’s imprecision bothered him, but he was “too cheap to spring for another acronym.” He also had a sparsely provisioned fridge, an abhorrence of public displays of ineptitude, and a “concise and ![]()
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