Books |
About Alice
Calvin Trillin
By
Published: Jul 08, 2013
Category:
Memoir
Alice Trillin died in New York City on September 11, 2001. Did anyone else die in Manhattan that day? In “About Alice,” her husband — the humorist and New Yorker writer Calvin (“Bud”) Trillin — makes no mention of it.
This is that kind of book.
For that matter, there is not a bedpan to be found in these pages. We learn that Alice had a bypass operation in the spring of 2001, that “the operation took much longer than expected,” and that the surgeons learned that the radiation used in the long ago treatment for her lung cancer — Alice, a non-smoker, probably acquired it from her parents, both smokers — had damaged her heart. She was released from the hospital a week before the marriage of her younger daughter. No question: she went.
After the wedding, Alice sent an e-mail to her friends. Trillin quotes it at length. The paragraph ends with her last line: “Life doesn’t get much better than this.”
“Four months later, speaking at Alice’s memorial service…” That’s how the next paragraph begins. Writers call that “compression.” Smart critics and readers call that “dazzling.” But some, I fear, will cry “not enough information.”
So that no one buys this and feels cheated, let’s be clear what “About Alice” is. Length: 72 pages. Format: big print, lots of white space — you can read it in an hour. Previous publication: Almost all of the book appeared in The New Yorker. If you read it there, you read it. The only reason to buy it now is because you loved it and want to have it around — or that you loved it and want to give it to someone you love. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. To buy the Kindle edition, click here.]
“About Alice” is not the tortured exercise in thought and language that Joan Didion delivers in The Year of Magical Thinking. It’s a love letter to a 35-year marriage — a buoyant, joyous, grateful-every-day marriage that many of us crave and few experience.
Calvin Trillin met Alice Stewart at a writers’ party in l963. Alice was clean and sleek and Wellesley — a creamy blonde on the Diane Sawyer model. He thought “she looked more alive than anyone I’d ever seen.” On second meeting, she thought he was funny. If so, it was because he was trying to impress her. And here’s the thing: He never stopped trying to impress her.
If you’re looking for the clue to this successful marriage — and, just maybe, all successful marriages — that’s the thought to hold. It’s a dangerous generalization, but I suspect that men fall out of love with women for all kinds of reasons; women fall out of love because they stop respecting their men. Calvin Trillin’s life work was writing pieces and books that his wife would admire. He was never in a moment’s danger of losing her love.
“About Alice” chronicles small moments. Its power is in the careful accretion of modest insights, small anecdotes, modest descriptions of character. Alice is decent and committed; she did great work helping underprepared minority students make it through New York colleges. She taught at a drug treatment center. She taught at Sing Sing.
Alice was not sugar and spice. At a banquet, she listened to New York Governor George Pataki deliver a moving speech. When he sat down, she told him, “That was one of the best speeches I ever heard.” Then she asked, “Why in the world are you a Republican?”
Mostly, it seems, Alice was that person it’s hard to be in this hypertense, overbusy world: a wife and mother. She sent the Trillin daughters out to do Meaningful Work, and they do it. She packed up her little boy’s lunchbox — I mean: her husband’s manuscripts — and sent him out in the world to shine. She was a graceful writer and an attractive personality; she could have had a bigger career. But she had her priorities.
All men marry up. That’s just the way things are. Bud Trillin married way up. To read his book is both to mourn his loss and cheer his extravagant good fortune. Which is to say: You’ll cry. And, also, you’ll laugh.
