Customer Reviews

Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This is a wonderful book. In an effort to understand his own rather constrained, Waspy nature, Tad Friend researches the lives of his various relatives--for the most part cheerful enough affairs on the surface (most of the time), but seething with a kind of quiet heartbreak. Friend himself would seem the picture of contentment: a successful NEW YORKER writer, a droll attractive fellow with loads of droll attractive friends, he yet feels a numbness of the soul that he can't quite understand. Coming to terms with this--the Wasp emotional inheritance--is the burden of this book. Nicely structured with a lot of contrapuntal set pieces about this or that relative, this or that girlfriend, the story draws one irresistibly along--and one might as well say it: I laughed and I cried, pretty much in equal parts. What I liked best about the book was the (how to put it?) companionability of the author--like a charming (but hitherto somewhat aloof) old pal who has a few too many one night and decides to bare his soul, half-seriously, though his audience comes to take him very seriously indeed.

My local librarian asked me why there was a long list of requests for Cheerful Money. "It must be good," she said. When I told her that it really wasn't very good she said, "well, it must have some kind of appeal." And it does...to a limited audience.

First of all, Cheerful Money is indeed not a very good book, but it will find a place in the genre of Wasp chronicles. The structure is meandering. At points the book is truly boring. And the characters never really come to life. I could see these flaws when I spent about 30 minutes in the aisle of my local book store giving it a speed-read and deciding that it was not worth buying. And yet, a few weeks later I was one of those who requested it from the library. I think if you have little or a lot of WASP in you or have lived close to one or many of them you are drawn to reading about this world and its dissolution in the second half of the 20th century. Maybe I needed that assurance that the WASP world had lost its relevance so I would feel safe in abandoning any aspirations that might have lingered from my own Seven Sister/ Ivy League college days.

Admittedly I skipped over many paragraphs and at least twice considering abandoning the book. But I was glad I finished it, even though the whole bit towards the end about the author's psychoanalysis and failed relationships was lame. Mr Friend is a good writer, better than shows in this book. He has a knack for finding just the right metaphor.

You will enjoy the book if you are interested in a glimpse into this bygone world. For a tighter and more interesting narrative of the same subject, George Colt's Big House has more poignancy and a surer social (as well as artistic) compass.

I'm a WASP with a similar background to the author's and somewhat of a pushover for books like this (John Cheever and John O'Hara are favorites) but this souffle fell flat. Some of the author's relatives have interesting moments, but not enough to sustain a book for outsiders, and there is far too much whingeing about his own troubles. This book should have been privately printed in leather covers and given to the author's relatives at Christmas.

...this book is best enjoyed by the people who were there.

Memoirs to me are an exercise in self indulgence unless the person writing has had a particularly interesting life. The author of this book hasn't.

He seems like a nice man, and is obviously a talented writer but perhaps he spends too much time with people of the same background (The New Yorker is hardly a mag for the masses) because he seems to think that nutty relatives, disappointments in childhood, the sad ends of promising people, and parents you love but don't always understand, belong exclusively to the life of a WASP. I'm very much not of his culture and yet I've experienced much of what he talks about. There's a snobbishness in thinking that his background elevates his memories to memoir status. Maybe that's the only thing about the book that is uniquely WASP. I get the sense of a man in mid-life trying to figure himself out through the lens of his childhood. Good for him. But it's not unique, and it's not interesting enough for a book.

I quickly found myself skimming for "The Good Parts" from among these extensive family histories and memoirs of old line monied people and their ancestors. Of course, each reader will have their own idiosyncratic "Good parts", and mine were the social class boundaries, and the religious/political opinions of the wealthy from the 1900's on. As well as the author's own love life, career and subsequent marriage with children. In essence, I had to do a lot of "skipping and picking" to get what I wanted from this book.

Tad Friend wrote a book about which another Amazon reviewer has written, "should be published privately for his family". I agree with those sentiments. Friend's writing is fine; the subject matter - his family and other WASPs he has known - and their mating, spending, educational proclivities, is just basically boring after a while.

The other thing that I thought lacking in the book was a proper "family tree". Friend includes one at the beginning of the book - and noted that it wasn't complete - and then proceeds to write about several close relatives, grandparents, aunts, and uncles who were not on the tree. I would have loved to know their "dates" and relationships with others in the family, but sadly, they weren't included. For instance, he writes about a cousin(?) named Norah Pierson, from his mother's side. She - and her sister - were non-conformists in the Pierson family. (Norah Pierson was a highly regarded jeweler out here in Santa Fe before her death). Even by closely searching the family tree, I couldn't find that branch.

The other reviews of this book on Amazon seem to run the gauntlet between five and one stars. Maybe it's not bad that Tad Friend's book evoked such a diverse range of opinion. It means readers are reading and thinking.

This memoir is evidence that a sense of entitlement does not make a riveting tale. The tone of the book is detached and almost prissy. The author, as well as his family, come across as spectacularly uninteresting. There are few observations about WASP culture, despite the book's grand subtitle. Put your white gloves on and skim.

As a fan of Mr. Friend's writing in the New Yorker, I had high hopes for this book. Unfortunately, I found Cheerful Money to be a disappointing, unorganized mash-up of stories about his surprisingly uninteresting family. Perhaps he needed a better editor, perhaps his talents lend themselves to shorter pieces rather than books, who knows.

I'm a couple of chapters into this book I'm amazed by how boring I find it. I went to school back east & understand this culture a little bit from the outside looking in. Friend sure is taking his time peeling back the layers. To continue or not. I'm not sure. I expected it to move along

One segment of society which has thankfully been under represented in our memoir-tapping, TV-confessional culture has been the Chosen Frozen, and with good reason: for all that life can thrown at one, if there's boarding school, an ivy, a summer house and the like to help weather whatever blasts come over the hedges, you're better off than 95% of the rest of the world. So why does Friend feel the need to run it out? For 300 pages? Nice that he spent five figures on a therapists couch to help I suppose, so is this the way to recoup his squandered inheritance? This may well have been a cathartic exercise for him, but were he not tapped into the literati-publishing world via The New Yorker and a wife at the Times, would a page of this have seen the light of day? If Louis Auchincloss and Dr Phil went in on a project together, this would be the transcript. I play squash, went to boarding school and our dinner tables were never soul-bearing tear fests either ...so where's my book deal? Hope you're feeling better Tad, but glad I rec'd the book as a loaner.