Cheerful Money: Me, My Family and the Last Days of WASP Splendor. By Tad Friend. Little, Brown and Company. 2009.
The essence of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture is reserve, hiding one’s feelings. Tad Friend’s parents encouraged this demeanor by giving their children “cheerful money”, a reward for being cheerful, whatever the circumstances.
I agree that reserve is an underrated virtue today. It’s exhausting to deal with people who believe the world needs a Tweet about their every passing sensation.
But excessive reserve has its downside, too. It often results in people who can’t say a sentence without a double meaning, who can’t praise without also criticizing, who can’t express an unmixed emotion to save their lives. There are more than a few of these in "Cheerful Money".
Friend is an excellent writer, which makes subjects of otherwise middling interest – the fading of WASP power and influence in the US, and the WASP lives of his grandparents and parents, his siblings and himself – fairly entertaining . So I can recommend this book as a way to relieve the tedium of a sick week. It’s far, far better than the stupid stuff you’ll find on daytime TV.
Tepidly recommended.
(Full disclosure: I read this book after a run of holocaust memoires. After Primo Levy's "Survival in Auschwitz", and its tale of surviving the worst the Nazis could devise, "Cheerful Money", about surviving a rather distant relationship with one’s mother, isn't as gripping. But we make our lives of the circumstances we are given and, thank heavens, most of us aren't given Auschwitz.)
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
Ranjit Souri
Siobhan Curious
Nerdyjen
Cassandra Berg
The Biblio Files
Kerry Lauerman
Salon.com
Comments