I like stories about friendship, particularly ones that acknowledge the importance that it has in our lives.  Like Ann Patchett’s very moving Truth and Beauty – also the story of two writers, one of whom dies suddenly and tragically — this is the chronicle of a long friendship between two women, but there is much less drama to the actual friendship between Knapp and Caldwell than existed between Patchett and the poet Lucy Grealy.  The friendship between Knapp and Caldwell is arguably more central to both of their lives.  They meet when Knapp is in her late 30s and Caldwell is 9 years her senior.  Both have recently adopted dogs and are well nigh obsessed with training them properly (Knapp was also the author of Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs, where Caldwell and her dog, Clementine, make a pseudonymous appearance).  Both are also recovering alcoholics.  Neither is married or involved with a man, though Knapp eventually reconciles with her on-again-off-again boyfriend and marries him the month before her death. Their friendship quickly escalates to the status of a primary relationship for both of them.  In a society where many people don’t marry, or wait many years before doing so, and many more leave marriages, Caldwell and Knapp shared their lives together as friends.  They talked, they competed, they swam and rowed (both exercise fanatics), they vacationed, they trained and walked their dogs together.  When Caldwell bought her first home, Knapp carried her over the threshold, laughing the whole time. Their friendship was deep and meaningful and important.

Of course no book is great just because it’s about something interesting and important.  And this is true of Caldwell’s.  It’s great because she writes beautifully, doing her utmost to describe what friendship means, how grief feels, and how loss manifests itself in our lives.  Caldwell begins:

It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died, and so we shared that, too.

Her writing is simple without being stark.  At times it is funny.  And often it is heartbreaking.  (I should say also that on the subject of grief, I far preferred this to Didion’s much fêted Year of Magical Thinking, which I found pretentious and without much new to say.) What works is how observant she is and how she is able to translate that to the page, to make us see what happened between her and Knapp, and why it mattered, why friendship matters. Caldwell recalls the moment when Knapp, a long-time smoker, is first diagnosed with lung cancer:

I remember two things from the rest of that day with glaring clarity.  One was Caroline crying as I wrapped my arms around her, after they had brought her back up to her room, when the first thing she said to me was “Are you mad at me?”  It was the voice of early terror, a primal response to bad news, and to this day I don’t know whether she meant because we had fought about the smoking or because she knew she was going to leave me.

And after her death:

For years, through the trials of writing or dog training or life’s ordinary bruises, Caroline and I had been the soothing, modulated voice in each other’s heads.  Now my thoughts were clanging around unnoticed and unheard, lonely music with too much bass.  For months, I kept wanting to call her, half assuming I could, to tell her what her dying had meant, what her death had done to my life.

These two excerpts simply do not do the book justice.  Suffice it to say that I read it all in one sitting, crying through the final third.

We begin this literary venture with the latest from Stephen McCauley, Insignificant Others. McCauley is the author of five previous novels, most famous among them The Object of My Affection, which was made into a movie starring Jennifer Aniston and the ever-dreamy Paul Rudd.  I first read McCauley when I was an undergrad and just coming to terms with the gay thing.  He writes novels that are quite funny but also often poignant. Combining these two elements isn’t always easy, but at his best McCauley makes it look so.  In my estimation his most recent two have not been as good as his early work, but he returns in fine form with Insignificant Others. It is the story of HR Director Richard Rossi, who is having a long-term affair with a straight married man but is also partnered with Conrad (who Richard has discovered is also having an affair of his own). Richard suffers few moral qualms about all this; he just doesn’t want to upset the precarious balance that has been established. The thing to know about McCauley is that you can’t take it all too seriously; his characters often do not.  The book is slightly implausible, but often ridiculously funny for being so. In addition McCauley is just so astute in his observations about people and life in general that the implausibility ceases to be a problem.  It’s also pretty clear that McCauley knows he’s writing some pretty absurd characters.  In sum, it is just hard to believe that people making such foolish choices could simultaneously also be this lucid or self-aware.  But it’s great fun for the reader that they are! I leave you with some gems from Insignificant Others.

This is a musing by Richard after being overheard by a small child:

From what I can tell, the chief distinguishing factor between children and adults is that children hear everything while appearing not to and adults hear nothing while pretending to listen.

This is the reaction of a female friend after Richard has lied to cover up his male friend’s own lie:

She frowned at me.  ”I won’t hold it against you for trying to back up his lie, Richard.  It seems to be the main purpose of male friendships.”

“Versus women’s friendships,” Conrad said amiably.  ”Which are all about discussing the lies the men in their lives tell them.”

About a personal trainer who has taken to spray tanning:

As people demand less and less be done to their food chemically, they seem to be insisting that more chemicals be applied directly onto or into their bodies; painted tans, injected lips, pharmaceutically elongated eyelashes.

And finally, in discussing golf:

It was all about letting loose your aggressions in a calculated way and then watching the effects on a helpless little ball, which perhaps explains the popularity of the sport among Republicans.

Add to all these witty observations a plot, and characters about whose fate you care, and it’s clear that Stephen McCauley is back in his element.  All the better for us!

Emily Post's Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage

One always has questions about social customs and one always wants to know the proper answers. Emily Post’s classic Etiquette has them!  Post explains on the cover that while the fundamentals remain untouched, “the problems of modern life demand certain changes in the forms of living.” This updated 1950 edition was only $6.  While I have long been a devotee of Miss Manners’ witty responses to readers’ questions on matters of etiquette (Dear Miss Manners: What am I supposed to say when I am introduced to a homosexual “couple”?  Gentle Reader: “How do you do?”  ”How do you do?”), Emily Post is the classic and I’m delighted to add her to my library.

The Dionne Quintuplets

Long before the McCaughey septuplets and “Jon and Kate Plus Eight” there were the Dionne quintuplets, the original multiple birth celebrities.  Identical quintuplets Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Emilie, and Marie Dionne (in their birth order) were born May 28, 1934 in rural central Ontario, just south of Nipissing Bay near the village of Corbeil.  Four months after their birth they were made wards of the government and became celebrities.  For a number of years in grade school I was obsessed with the Dionne quintuplets and wrote a couple research “papers” on them.  So imagine my delight to come upon this framed souvenir photograph of the quints for only $14!  What a steal.

The Dionne quints lived for nine years as wards of the government of Ontario, starred in four Hollywood films, and were put on display in Quintland, the theme park whose revenue surpassed that of Niagara Falls and generated more tourist dollars for Ontario than any other attraction at the time.  When the McCaughey septuplets were born in 1997, the surviving Dionne sisters wrote their parents a letter beseeching them not to exploit their children and warning them of the dire consequences.  Imagine what they would say to Jon and Kate!

Emilie died at age 20 following an epileptic seizure.  Marie suffered a fatal blood clot at the age of 35. And Yvonne succumbed to cancer at age 67.  Now 75, Annette and Cécile live as anonymously as possible in a Montréal suburb.

It is the story of Undine Spragg, which must be one of the most hideous names in all of literature. Her parents named her for a hair-waver her father manufactured that came out the week she was born. As her mother, Leota B. Spragg, explains, “‘It’s from undoolay, you know, the French for crimping.” Undine and her nouveau riche parents move from Midwestern Apex City (yes, really) to the Big Apple in order to give her the chance of making it in society. Undine is, at least, beautiful, but she’s often seriously dumb and remarkably vain, which make the novel all the more fun. Early on in the novel she goes to a museum to “look at the pictures” because she had discovered at a dinner party the night before that this was something that fashionable people did. Wharton writes:

Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jeweled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand.

Undine is the social climber par excellence, giving Thackeray’s Becky Sharp a run for her money. And Wharton is fantastic at describing the ways that Undine learns the ways of New York society, makes mistakes and then learns from them, ditching friends (and husbands) along the way when they are no longer useful to her. By the end of the novel she has married four times, is a very wealthy woman, and yet always what she wants is just slightly beyond her grasp. She has designs on an ambassadorship for her fourth husband (also her first), Elmer Moffatt, but he informs her that it won’t be possible because ambassadors cannot be married to divorcées (which she is), and thus he will never be made an ambassador. As Wharton explains in the final paragraph of the novel, “She had learned that there was something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for her. She could never be an Ambassador’s wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guests she said to herself that it was the one part that she was really made for.”

Denver may have been cold and snowy but as long as I’ve got Undine to keep me company, you won’t hear me complain!