Tad Friend

I picked up this book because 1) I like Tad Friend's writing in The New Yorker, 2) I am a WASP, 3) I attended Swarthmore College, where Friend's father was President from 1973 - 1982, and, 4) said father gave me a one hour oral exam in American History as part of Swarthmore's Honors program (before he was President). I passed.

Friend's examination of his WASP family and friends produces a number of witty vignettes. Here are some of the best.

"Wasps love mud because it - along with beach sand show more in the sheets - is their only sanctioned form of filth. You are allowed and even encouraged to get dirty on a birding ramble or in a game of touch football. Such stains are dueling scars, noble marks of privilege and leisure. It's discretionary mud, clean mud."

* * *
"Grievances in my family are like underground coal fires: hard to detect and nearly impossible to extinguish."

* * *
"Wasp tableware is anything that abhors the dishwasher: gold-rimmed chargers, etched-crystal wineglasses, pedestaled fruit plates, egg spoons of translucent horn. My parents' inherited silver alone included mint-julep spoons, bouillon spoons, demitasse spoons, a stuffing spoon, a berry spoon, a pea spoon, sugar tongs, a butter pick, a pickle fork, a lettuce fork, a cocoa pot, salt tubs, and an egg warmer."

* * *
"[B]oozing was permitted, even encouraged, in our world, as long as it conformed to protocols designed to avert that word 'alcoholic.' There are, after all, only a few circumstances in which Wasps may properly drop their guard: charades or costume parties; roughhousing with dogs, who enact their owner's feelings by proxy; and cocktail hour, the solvent of all care."

* * *
"An older Wasp friend remarks, 'The new rich behave as if they don't have to deserve spending their money. Whereas when I took my family to Nevis recently, I had to tell myself, 'I'm going to die soon.' The prospect of a swift and retributive death makes giving yourself pleasure just tolerable. Otherwise it's too close to masturbation.' "

* * *
"If Catholic guilt is 'I've been bad' and Jewish guilt is 'You've been bad,' then Wasp guilt is 'You probably think I've been bad.' Wasp guilt derives from knowing your ancestors would say you'd let down the side."

The book presents these trenchant observations as it meanders through Friend's life, his loves, his endless analysis and, mostly, his family and relations (both close and distant). The Family Tree at the start of the book provides only minimal help in sorting through nicknames, friends, and relations who did not make "the tree." But Friend's writing is so good that you don't really have to know who he is writing about to enjoy what he is saying. show less

I have finished Tad Friend'sCheerful Money. It is not unlike The Big House by George Howe Colt except that Friend has a wider ambition which is no less than to attempt to capture a culture in its 'last days' through the medium of his own family ...... I wanted to write 'death throes' only that seems overly dramatic for a group that seems more to be fading away than going out with any sort of fanfare. More than once I found myself wondering how any of this could possibly be interesting to show more anyone NOT a Wasp. Does anyone care anymore? Isn't that the point? Unlike the aristocrats of Europe, this class, though for awhile its members dominated the country financially, socially, and politically have had no lasting power -nor have they much lingering cachet: no titles to attract social climbers, no entailed and protected estates in some drafty corner of which they moulder quaintly, nothing but swifty evaporating trust funds.... And yet I suspect this class on the whole is both more sly and more resilient than Friend give them credit for, that the special breed of east coast Wasp persists fairly intact even without dumbwaiters, fingerbowls and silent butlers albeit in muted and even mutated form, but nowhere near dead and gone. At the same time, it seems to be a sign of the basic health of American society that this group has been displaced not by any one monolithic new group (say the Goths over the Romans) but more it has mainly become simply one of many. show less

This book was more confessional about the author's struggles with his own life than I expected. Being roughly the same age and having experienced the deaths of both my parents, I appreciate how he explores the complexity of the loss of his father.

I read his story in the New Yorker about his relationship with his mother and liked it, so I thought I'd like this book - also since I live in Swarthmore where his father was president of the college in the 70s. The openness he had about his mother seems to have disappeared, perhaps because of the reaction he got from his family. His father, for instance, complained of his emotional coldness or sterility. It seems Friend reacted with even more sterility. Every time he began to write about show more himself, he quickly retreated into stories about his ancestors, or the contents of their houses. Any genuine feelings Friend might have had were chased off with endless descriptions of his boring materialistic relatives, or endless name-dropping, or endless enumerations of possessions. He disliked Swarthmore, feeling much more at home on the Main Line, and that explains a lot to those of us who live here. show less