TH5 Summer Sampler

7

In the late 1980s, the British music critic Simon Reynolds coined the term “miserabilism” to describe Morrissey and the numerous Manches-ter bands spreading their very personal gloom across the globe. The word could also be applied to the “Merritt Parkway Novel,” Gerald Howard’s term for the miserabilist fiction produced within a stone’s throw of the road cutting through affluent, suburban Connecticut, from Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to Richard Yates’s Revolution-ary Road to Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm. Howard reevaluates the cultural impact of these novels and examines their continuing influence.

Fittingly, Tin House 52 features work pushing the realistic envelope, including Amy Hempel’s powerful, closely observed story “A Full Service Shelter,” Alice Munro’s older couple coming to grips with mortality in “Dolly,” Sherman Alexie’s poem of loss and legacies in

“Crazy Horse Boulevard,” and Anne Carson’s poetic essay on the idea of threat in “We Point the Bone.” This issue looks both forward and backward, with Lost and Found appreciations of Patricia Highsmith’s The Tremor of Forgery, by Aaron Hamburger, and Annie Ernaux’s A Man’s Place, by Francine Prose. Consider this summer reading as providing a few grains of sand in your suntan lotion, a little bit of grit to remind you of the depth and breadth of the human condition.

Sadly, as we were going to press, we learned that the great Adrienne Rich has passed away. Here we feature one of her last poems, “From Strata.” Fierce to the end, Rich once said, “Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard.”

If you are looking for relentless cheer, go to www.cuteoverload.com (yes, we have it bookmarked in the office), but if you are looking to be challenged and possibly maddened, please pull up your beach chair, turn the page, and engage. Happy complicated reading, everyone.

E D I T O R ’ S N OT E

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CONTENTSISS UE #52 / S U MM E R R EADI NG

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Fiction ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Holly Goddard Jones

The Right Way to End a Story 5 Julia had been tending a fantasy about the famous photographer who would be lodging with her at the college’s guesthouse. …………. 12

Amy Hempel

A Full-Service Shelter 5 They knew me as one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose—and liked it. …………. 42

Alice Munro

Dolly 5 There had been some discussion of death. Our deaths. …………… 65

Kristen Iskandrian

The Inheritors 5 After my mother died, a lot of things went into boxes that then disappeared. …………… 81

Jess Row

Summer Song 5 Much of what they did that summer involved watching. …………… 140

Alexander Maksik

Snake River Gorge 5 Brother, are you happy here? I mean, is this the way you imagined it going? Your life, I mean? ………… 156

Nina Buckless

Deer 5 His mother had left him on Thompson’s front walkway when he was only four days old.

………… 174

Lee K. Abbott

From Here to Kingdom Come 5 He’d stopped pushing the bike to take a leak and there he was, his privates hanging out, when he noticed something—a body part. ………… 189

N E W V O I C E – F I C T I O N

Bennett Sims

House-sitting 5 Within moments of arriving at the cabin, you begin to suspect that the owner is a madman. ………… 102

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Poetry |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Adrienne Rich

From Strata ………… 37

Cate Marvin

Thoughts on Wisteria …………. 61On the Ineptitude of Certain Hurricanes …………. 63

Sherman Alexie

Crazy Horse Boulevard ………… 95

Angelo Nikolopoulos

Lypsinka Has a Fit ………… 154

Barbara Ras

Relics ………… 187

Sandra Beasley

The Sword Swallower’s Valentine ………… 206Valentine for the Grave Digger ………… 208

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Features ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Gerald Howard

Notes on the Merritt Parkway Novel 5 Lasciviousness and lassitude suffuse a subgenre of American belles lettres. ……… 51

Anne Carson

We Point the Bone: An Essay on Thre–at 5 I was flailing at trauma. I worked without realistic expectation of follow-through, not much good at actual harm. ………… 148

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Lost & Found |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Francine Prose

On Annie Ernaux’s A Man’s Place 5 Wrestling with her father’s existence leads the author to consider life’s deepest questions. …………. 126

Paul Charles Griffin

On Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake 5 Marlowe’s willingness to get up every day and do the right thing in a corrupt society can be an antidote for cynicism. …………. 129

Luis Jaramillo

On E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady 5 It’s amazing how persistent the feeling of not-enoughness can be. …………. 132

Robin Romm

On Alison Lurie’s The War Between the Tates 5 Subtle judgments and withering observations abound in this book by a baleful comic artist at her most corrosive. ………. 134

Aaron Hamburger

On Patricia Highsmith’s The Tremor of Forgery 5 The American master of suspense manufactures a literary masterpiece .……… 137

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Readable Feast ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||Katie Arnold-Ratliff

Cooking with Friends 5 Guess who’s coming to dinner? Monica, Chandler, Joey, Rachel, Phoebe, and Ross! ………… 210

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Last Word |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||A Tin House Crossword Puzzle ………… 215

TH52-int-FINAL-v2.indd 42 4/17/12 1:12 PM

f i c T i o n

Bb

A Full-Service

Shelter“They knew me as one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose.”

—LeOnarD mICHaeLs, “In THe FIFTIes”

They knew me as one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose—and liked it. and would rather do that than go to a movie or have dinner with a friend. They knew me as one who came two nights a week, who came at four and stayed till after ten, and knew it was not enough, because there was no such thing as enough at the animal shelter in spanish Harlem that was run by the city, which kept cutting the funds.

Amy Hempel


amy HemPeL44

They knew us as the ones who checked the day’s euth list for the names of the dogs scheduled to be killed the next morning, who came to take the death-row dogs, who were mostly pit bulls, for a last long walk, brought them good dinners, cleaned out their kennels, and made their beds with beach towels and bath mats and torn sheets and scooby-Doo fleece blan-kets still warm from industrial dryers. They knew me as one who made their beds less neatly over the course of a difficult evening, who thought of the artist whose young daughter came to visit his studio, pointed to the painting she liked, and asked, “Why didn’t you make them all good?”

They knew us as the ones who put pigs’ ears on their pillows, like a chocolate in a good hotel. They knew us as vocal vegetarians who brought them cooked meat—roast turkey, rare roast beef, and honey-glazed ham—to top off the canned food we supplied that was still better than what they were fed there. They knew us as the ones who fed them when they were awake, instead of waking them at 2:00 AM for feeding, the way the overnight staff had been ordered by a director who felt they did not have enough to do.

They knew me as one who spoke no spanish, who could say only “si, si” when someone said about a dog I was walking, “Que lindo!” and when a thuggish guy approached too fast, then said, “That’s a handsome dude,” look how we exploded another stereotype in a neighborhood recovering from itself.

They knew us as the ones who had no time for the argument that car-ing about animals means you don’t also care about people; one of us did! evelyne, a pediatrician who treated abused children.

They knew us as the ones who got tetanus shots and rabies shots—the latter still a series but no longer in the stomach—and who closed the bites and gashes on our arms with Krazy glue—not the medical grade, but the kind you find at hardware stores—instead of going to the er for stitches, where we would have had to report the dog, who would then be put to death.

They knew us as the ones who argued the names assigned at Intake, saying, “Who will adopt a dog named nixon?” and when nixon’s name was changed—changed to Dahmer—we ragged on them again, then just let it go when the final name assigned was O.G., Original Gangster. There was always a “Baby” on one of the wards so that staff could write on the kennel card, “no one puts Baby in the corner,” and they finally stopped using “Precious” after a senior kennel worker said of a noble, aged rottie, p

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45A Full-Service Shelter

“I fucking hate this name, but this is a good dog.” (Though often they got it right: they named the cowboy-colored pocket pit who thought he was a big stud, man man).

They knew me as one who did not bother wearing latex gloves or gauzy scrubs to handle the dogs in sick ward, who wore gloves only when a dog had swallowed his rabies tag, and I had to feel for it in feces. They knew me as one who gave a pit bull a rawhide chew stick swirled in peanut but-ter, then, after he spit it up and wanted it back, cleaned it off and gave it to him so he could have . . . closure.

They knew us as the ones who put our fingers in mouths to retrieve a watch, a cell phone, a red bicycle reflector that a dog sucked on like a lozenge.

They knew me as one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose, who scoured metal walls and perforated metal floors with Trifectant, the syrupy, yellow chemical wash that foamed into the mess, and then towel-dried the ken-nel and liked the tangible improvement—like mowing a lawn or ironing a shirt—that reduced their anxiety by even that much.

They knew me as one who, early on, went to tell a vet tech the good news that three dogs had been rescued from that morning’s list of twelve, to which the tech said, “That blows—I already filled twelve syringes.”

They knew us as the ones who repeatedly thanked the other vet tech, the one who was reprimanded for refusing to kill Charlie, the pit bull who licked his hand when the tech went to inject him. and Charlie was adopted less than twenty-four hours later by a family who sent us photos of their five-year-old daughter asleep atop Charlie, the whole story like a children’s book, or maybe a German children’s book. and we kept thank-ing the vet tech, until he was fired for killing two of the wrong dogs, their six-digit ID numbers one digit off. He didn’t catch the mistake, but nei-ther had the kennel worker who brought him the wrong dogs, and who still has his job.

They knew us as those who found them magnificent with their wide-spaced eyes and powerfully muscled bodies, their sense of humor and spirit, the way they were “first to the dance and last to leave,” even in a House of Horrors, the way stillness would take them over as they pushed their heads into our stomachs while sitting in our laps. They knew us as those whose

They knew me as one who did not bother wearing latex gloves or gauzy scrubs to handle the dogs in sick ward.


amy HemPeL46

enthusiasm for them was palpable, rebecca falling in love with them “at first sight, second sight, third sight,” and yolanda tending to them with broken fin-gers still in a cast, and Joy and the rest with their surpassing competence and compassion. They knew us as those who would sometimes need to take out a Chihuahua—“like walking an ant,” Laurie said—for a break. They knew us

as those who didn’t mind when they back-washed our coffee, when they licked the paper cup the moment we looked away. They knew us as the ones who worked for free, who felt that an hour stroking a blanket-wrapped dog whose head never left your lap and who was killed the next morning was time well spent.

They knew me as the least knowledgeable one there, whose mistakes were witnessed by those who knew better.

They knew me as one who liked to apply the phrase, “the ideal version of”—as in “Cure Chanel’s mange and you’ll see the ideal version of her-self”—but did not like the term “comfort zone,” and thought one should try to move beyond it.

They knew me as one who was unsure of small dogs, having grown up with large breeds and knowing how to read them, but still afraid of the Presa Canarios, the molossers bred in the Canary Islands, with their dark bulk and bloodshot bedroom eyes, since I had lived in san Francisco when a pair of them loose in a tony apartment house had killed a friend of mine who had stopped to get her mail and could not get her door unlocked before the attack began.

They knew me as one who called one of their number a dick when he knocked me over and I slammed into a steel bolt that left me bleeding from just above an eye. They knew me as one who guided them to step over the thick coiled hose in the packed garage that was being used weekly by a member of the board of directors to wash his car the city paid for. He never went inside the building.

They knew us as the ones who attached a life-size plastic horse’s head to a tree in the fenced-in junkyard backyard, where the dogs could be taken to run off leash one at a time, and to sniff the horse’s head before lifting a leg against it. They knew us as those who circulated photos of two pit littermates dive-bombing each other under the blankets of a bed to get closer to the large-hearted woman who had adopted them both.

How do you think a starving dog will score on “resources guarding” when you try to

take away a bowl of food!



They knew us as the ones who took them out, those rated “no con-cern” and “mild,” also “moderate,” and even “severe,” though never the red-stamped “caution” dogs. although some of the sweetest dogs were the ones rated “moderate,” which was puzzling until we realized that behav-ior testing was done when a stray was brought in by police or a dog sur-rendered by his owner, when they were most scared. “Fearful” is the new “moderate.” and how do you think a starving dog will score on “resources guarding” when you try to take away a bowl of food! They knew me as one who never handled the “questionable” dogs, because that meant they could turn on you in an instant, you wouldn’t know what was coming, and some of us got enough of that outside the shelter.

They knew me as one whom enrique had it in for, the kennel worker who had asked me to take out a one-hundred-fifty-pound Cane Corso, and when I said, “Isn’t he ‘severe’?” said, “naw, he’s a good boy,” and when I looked up his card he was not only “severe,” he was also DOH-HB hold—Department of Health hold for Human Bite. He had bitten his owner.

They knew me as one who forgave enrique when he slipped on the newly installed floor while subduing a frightened mastiff, fell, and punc-tured a lung. after voting to spend nearly fifty thousand dollars to replace the facility’s floor, the board then had to allocate funds to bring in a crew with sanders to rough up the pricey new floor. The allocated funds were diverted from supplies, so kennel staff had to ask us, the volunteers, for food when they ran out because feeding the dogs had not factored into the board’s decision.

They knew me as one who held the scarred muzzle of a long-nosed mutt in sick ward and sang, “There is a nose in spanish Harlem” until he slept.

They knew me as one who refused to lock the padlocks on their ken-nels, the locks a new requirement after someone stole a puppy from small Dog adoptions, and which guarantee the dogs will die in the event the place catches fire.

They knew me as one who asked them stupid questions—How did you get so cute?—and answered the questions stupidly, saying on behalf of the giddy dog, “I was born cute and kept getting cuter.” They knew me as one who talked baby talk to the babies, and spoke in a normal voice about cur-rent events to those who enjoyed this sort of discourse during their one-on-ones. I told an elderly pittie about the World War II hero who died in


amy HemPeL48

his nineties this year in a Florida hospital after having been subdued while in emotional distress by the use of a metal cage that was fixed in place over his bed. The Posey Cage had been outlawed in eastern europe, yet was still somehow available in Florida. Caged in the space of his bed, “he died like a dog,” people said.

They knew us as the ones who wrote Congress in support of laws made necessary by human cruelty and named for canine victims: Oreo’s Law, nitro’s Law, the law for the hero dog from afghanistan, and that’s just this year.

They knew me as one who loved in them what I recoiled from in peo-ple: the patent need, the clinging, the appetite. They knew me as one who saw their souls in their faces, who had never seen eyes more expressive than theirs in colors of clover honey, root beer, riverbed, and the tricolor “cracked-glass” eyes of a Catahoula, rare to find up north. They knew us as the ones who wrote their biographies to post to rescue groups, cam-paigning for the rescue of dogs that we likened to Cleopatra, the Lone ranger, or Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp, to John Wayne, Johnny Depp, and, of course, Brad Pitt, asking each other if we’d gone overboard or gone soft, like Lennie in Of Mice and Men. They knew us as the ones who tried to gauge what they had been through, as when Laurie said of a dog with shunts draining wounds on his head, “He looks exhausted even when he’s asleep.”

They knew us as the ones who wrote letters to the mayor pointing out that the Department of Health had vastly underestimated the number of dogs in the city to clear itself of misconduct for failing to license more. The political term for this is “inflating their compliance record.” They knew Joy as the stellar investigator who told the rest of us that the gov-ernor helped boost the state budget by helping himself to funds that had been set aside to subsidize spay/neuter services throughout the state.

They knew that? They seemed to know that, just as they seemed to appreciate Joy’s attempt to make a new worker understand that staff had not “forgotten” to write down the times they had walked certain dogs, that the blank space under dates on the log sheets three days in a row meant that those dogs had not been walked in three days. “When the budget was cut by a million and a half,” Joy began. But the new worker did not believe her.

They knew us as the ones who decoded reasons for surrender and knew that “don’t have time” for an elderly, ill dog meant the owner had been hit



hard by the ruined economy and could not afford veterinary bills. They knew us as the ones who doted on “throwaway moms,” lactating dogs left tied to posts in the Bronx after the owners sold their puppies, and the terrified young bait dogs—we would do anything for them—their heads and bodies crossed with scars like unlucky lifelines in a human hand, yet whose tails still wagged when we reached to pet them. They knew me as one who changed her mind about Presa Canarios when I found one wearing an e-collar that kept him from reaching his food. I had to hold his bowl up to his mouth inside the plastic cone for him to eat; I lost my fear of Presas.

They knew me as one who had Bully Project on speed dial, who knew that own-ing more than five dogs in Connecticut was, legally, hoarding, who regu-larly “fake-pulled” a much-loved dog when I found that dog on the list, pretending to be a rescue group, so that in the twenty-four hours it took for the shelter manager to learn it was fake, the dog would have that time to be pulled for real.

They knew me as one who got jacked-up on rage and didn’t know what to do with it, until a dog dug a ball from a corner of his kennel and brought it to my side, as though to ask, “Have you thought of this?”

They knew me as one who learned a phrase in spanish: “Lo siento mucho,” I am so sorry, and used it often in the lobby when handed over a dog by owners who faced eviction by the new york City Housing author-ity if they didn’t surrender their pit.

They knew me as one who wrote a plea for a dog named storm, due to be killed the next morning, and posted the plea and then went home, to learn the next day that there had been two dogs named storm in the shelter that night, and the one who needed the plea had been killed that morning—I had failed to check the ID number of the dog. so this is not about heroics; it’s about an impossible job. I joined them in filth and fear, and then I left them there.

They knew me as one who walked them past the homeless man on east 110th who said, “you want to rescue somebody, rescue me.”

They knew me as one who saw through the windowed panel in a closed ward door a dog lift first one front paw and then the other, offering a paw

They knew me as one who walked them past the homeless man on East 110th who said, “You want to rescue somebody, rescue me.”


amy HemPeL50

to shake though there was no one there, doing a trick he had once been taught and praised for, a dog not yet damaged but desperate.

They knew me as one who decoded the civic boast of a “full-service” shelter, that it means the place kills animals, that the “full-service” offered is death.

They knew me as one who learned that the funds allocated for the dan-gerous new floor had also been taken from medical, that the board had determined as “nonessential”: the first injection, the sedative before the injection of pentobarbital that kills them, and since it will take up to fif-teen seconds for the pentobarb to work, the dogs are then made to walk across the room to join the stack of bodies, only some of which are bagged. This will be the dogs’ last image of life on earth. my fantasy has them wak-ing to find themselves paddling with full stomachs in the warm Caribbean, treading the clearest water over rippled white sand until they find them-selves refreshed farther out in cooler water, in the deep blue reef-scarred sea.

They knew me as one who asked another volunteer if she would mind holding Creamsicle, a young vanilla and orange pup, while I cleaned his soiled kennel and made his bed at the end of a night. I knew that Katerina would leave the shelter in minutes for the hospital nearby where her father was about to die. she rocked the sleepy pup in her arms. she said, “you are working too fast.” she kissed the pup. she handed him to me. she said to me, “you should take your time.” We were both tired, and took turns hold-ing the pup against our hearts. They saw this; they knew this. The ward went quiet. We took our time.


51

Gerald Howard

An echo chamber of ennui

e s s a y

Ss

NOTES ON ThE

MERRiTT PARkWAy NOvEl

“There must be something hanging over us, something that makes it hard to be happy.”

—sLOan WILsOn, T H E M A N I N T H E

G R AY F L A N N E L Su I T

“Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . Political conviction, financial situation, religion—all these seek hideouts and the family is the rotten, dismal edificein whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited.”

—WaLTer BenJamIn,

“One-Way sTreeT ”

When the weather and the traffic permit, and there is no overtestosteroned bond trader–driven Porsche or audi ten feet from your rear bumper, a drive through Connecticut on the leafy merritt Parkway offers some of the pleasantest highway motoring on the east Coast. Built from 1934 through 1940 in the depths of the Depression, this handsomely landscaped thirty-seven-mile road features a succes-sion of battlement-like overpasses that whiz by like the slide show for a survey course in architectural styles from classical, Gothic, and romanesque to Beaux arts,


53Notes on the Merritt Parkway Novel

three decades. But as I try to imagine the lives of the people dwelling in those hand-some houses behind the stone walls and hedgerows, it is not happiness and pros-perity that come to mind, but rather well-appointed misery and a peculiarly american

form of spiritual squalor. sordid adulteries. social climbing and status anxi-ety. Decaying marriages. Bitter divorces. munic-ipal strife. Parents baf-fled by their children and children contemptuous of their parents. The cor-rosive despair of alco-holism. Class and ethnic prejudice. The thousand

worries of real estate. and many other lead-ing indicators of domestic toxicity. Where would I get such ideas? From the fiction of Fairfield County, of course, a distinct and fascinating subset of the literature of sub-urbia that I have come to call “the merritt Parkway novel.”

I am hardly the first person to have noticed that the fiction of postwar sub-urban Connecticut constitutes almost a genre unto itself. Jonathan Franzen, our designated literary scourge of the upper-middle class, states in his introduction to the current edition of the ur–Fairfield County novel, sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit: “One of the classic set-tings in fiction, a little world as reassur-ing as imperial st. Petersburg or Victo-rian London, is suburban Connecticut in the 1950s.” He points out that Wilson’s

art Deco and moderne, and machine age designs. The merritt winds its tree-lined way through Fairfield County and several of the most prosperous, desir-able, and envied suburban towns in the country: Greenwich, a haven for billion-aires where the leaves and field stones don’t seem so much cared for as curated; Darien, whose name is synony-mous with upper-class, lacrosse-playing priv-ilege; the rather too allegorically named but equally flush new Canaan; and Westport, the spiritual home of the six o’clock martini and Mad Men–era ad execs. even stamford, a sizable city of office parks and buildings, is tony enough to have served as the home of conservative icon William F. Buckley and his legend-arily social wife, Pat. If there is a stretch of territory that can be said to deliver defini-tively, in Herbert Croly’s resonant phrase, “the Promise of american Life,” it is the gilded towns of this Gold Coast. Here, the children really are all above average (or had better be) and can regard as their birthright early admission to stanford, Duke, or Princeton, followed by fantasti-cally well-compensated employment at the country’s most prestigious financial insti-tutions. Or so the mythology goes.

I have spent hundreds of hours on the merritt, driving to and from Cape Cod from and to our home in new york for almost

It is not happiness and

prosperity that come to

mind, but rather well-

appointed misery and a

peculiarly American form

of spiritual squalor.

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what he does, but I want to eat, and so, like a half million other guys in gray flannel suits, I’ll always pretend to agree, until I get big enough to be honest without being hurt. That’s not being crooked, it’s being smart.”

But what seems today to be a cliché fit for a high school social stud-ies textbook must, in 1955, have struck many thousands of readers with the shock of rec-ognition. What truly elevates the book above the status of a subur-ban problem novel with an anodyne and evasive

conclusion is the way that rath’s wartime experiences as a combat paratrooper haunt, as idyll, adventure, and nightmare alike, his placid if anxious peacetime life. In this regard, it reads something like a sequel to the landmark film of postwar readjustment The Best Years of Our Lives, with rath in the Dana andrews role—securely employed but still unable to escape the ghosts of war, a man marked and set apart by this passage, as so many americans were. The flashbacks to scenes of brutal combat, including rath’s accidental shooting of a buddy, have a vis-ceral immediacy that make you understand his inability to quite give himself over to what was once quaintly called the “rat race.” It prompts the thought that the american experience of World War II was not so much assimilated as willfully set aside and imperfectly buried.

demiclassic has become, along with the nonfiction works of social criticism The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man, “a watchword of fifties conformity,” offer-ing the contemporary reader “a pure fifties fix,” as indeed it does. What is truly fasci-nating, though, is to trace how the themes and con-flicts that Wilson so pre-sciently grappled with—broadly stated, the prob-lem of living a mean-ingful and authentic life in the midst of postwar american prosperity and rapidly shifting val-ues—have morphed and shape-shifted over five decades of american fiction. The evi-dence, at least as presented by today’s nov-elists, is that happiness on “the crabgrass frontier” remains elusive and that our ever-increasing freedoms have not availed us in that quest.

Before undertaking this essay, I had never read The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, content in the received notion that the novel is an indictment of commuter corporate con-formity—of a timid man selling out his soul for security and certain modest pros-perity. There is plenty of material in the novel to support such a view. Here is Tom rath, the book’s protagonist, mulling over the consequences of disagreeing with the high-powered executive for whom he must write a speech on that echt fifties subject, mental health: “I should quit if I don’t like

By the midfifties, the

American intelligentsia

had decided that the

mass exodus of families

from cities to suburbs

was a disaster.



to the cash-strapped commuter families on revolving credit. and the commut-ers’ wives wage futile battles against the entrenched yankees for better schools, sewers, and garbage-disposal plants. Then one day this fractured community finally finds itself united against a massive threat to its real estate values: a guided-missile base to be installed by the U.s. army

shulman’s genial farce skewers a whole host of fifties sacred cows and anxieties, from progressive education to juvenile delinquency to junk-television program-ming to the military mind. But the inter-necine battles of real estate and the gnaw-ing discontent besetting the town’s mar-riages give the book a sharper edge than I had remembered. By the midfifties, the american intelligentsia had decided that the mass exodus of families from cities to suburbs was a disaster on every level, from the fiscal to the existential. a prime example of this withering critique is John Keats’s 1956 screed, The Crack in the Picture Window. Part exercise in David Brooksian pop sociology, part angry polemic, Keats’s book portrays the lives of his hapless speci-men couple John and mary Drone (subtle, he is not) in a new suburban subdivision as little more than a “domestic hell on earth”—“developments conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch.”

In Keats’s jaundiced view, the devel-opment of postwar suburbia is the result of an unholy alliance among the realtors; the national association of Home Build-ers, who saw a killing to be made; and the U.s. government, which provided low-cost

Wilson concludes the novel with his hero setting forth on a mildly indepen-dent if unclear path, his money troubles solved through the sale—abetted by his wife’s energetic lobbying of the zoning board—of a tract of inherited land on the Westport shore to a housing developer. and here we come to one of the core sub-jects of the merritt Parkway novel—real estate, which often functions in american domestic fiction in much the same way that adultery does in French novels.

For a clear-eyed view of the social and economic forces at work in fifties subur-ban Connecticut, you could do a lot worse than max shulman’s expert 1957 satire, Rally Round the Flag, Boys! The half new eng-land village/half commuter bedroom com-munity of Putnam’s Landing (transpar-ently based on Westport, where shulman lived) is stratified among the old Connect-icut yankees, who view newcomers and change with disdain, but are not averse to making a buck off them; the Italian trades-men and their families, who provide the community services and much of the social glue; and “the new york commuters, also called the lambs, or the pigeons, or the patsies.” The latter class is represented by Harry Bannerman, a magazine editor with three kids, two mortgages, an unsatisfac-tory house, a sexually stalled marriage, “a gray flannel suit, a bald spot and a vague feeling of discontent.” The yankees wax fat by christening tracts of land “Flintlock ridge” and “Powderhorn Hill” and a for-mer gravel pit “Upper meadow.” The Ital-ians prosper by selling goods and services


GeraLD HOWarD56

2008 film adaptation is marred by exces-sive tastefulness and the usual callowness of Leonardo DiCaprio in the male lead. Its protagonists, stuck in their bickerfest of a marriage in a wan suburban setting, must be the least attractive, most ignoble couple ever to inhabit an important american novel—every problem they face is of their own devising. and yet yates, with his fierce conviction and astonishingly precise writing, triumphs over this unpromising material to deliver exactly the catharsis of pity and terror that aristotle prescribed.

Frank and april Wheeler are two disas-trously matched narcissists who, based on no empirical evidence whatsoever, feel them-selves vastly superior to their midfifties Con-necticut surroundings. Frank, a World War II veteran and Columbia grad goldbricking his way through a sales-promotion job in a proto-IBm corporation, is a living argu-ment against a liberal arts education, a tire-some font of stale ideas about the sterility of suburban life. (One imagines he bought and read Keats’s book. “I don’t suppose one pic-ture window is necessarily going to destroy our personalities,” he declares when he first sees their house. ) Faced with the reality of “deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs,” he smugly tells him-self that “[e]conomic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but . . . [t]he important thing, always, was to remember who you were.” april, a failed actress, experiences her domestic life as a wife and mother as a bleak exile from cul-ture and deeper purpose—“an enormous, obscene delusion,” she solemnly declaims.

no-money-down mortgages to the return-ing GIs and their growing broods. every-body has made out except the families, trapped in a bleak monoculture, over-stretched in their budgets, beset by the sort of marital boredom that leads—shud-der—to casual adultery, and, maybe worst of all, raising their kids in “a matriar-chal society, with children who know men only as nighttime residents and weekend guests.” Who knows what sort of twisted little monsters these postwar Levittowns were breeding?

Keats scores some valid points as he unpacks the predatory economics of nascent suburban sprawl, though his cul-tural argument is too perfervid and marred by snide contempt to carry much weight. But as an example of just how sharply edu-cated opinion had turned against suburbia, The Crack in the Picture Window helps us under-stand the background against which the one unequivocal masterpiece of the merritt Parkway novel, richard yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961) was received. By the time yates decided to replay as tragedy many of the same elements that Wilson had rendered as melodrama and shulman as satirical farce, the cultural ground had been well prepared for such a grim approach.

For years I resisted reading Revolutionary Road, a book that gives off the distinct aroma of being oversold as the Great statement on the sorrow of suburbia. yates’s other books had all struck me as willfully morose—he really is the Debbie Downer of american letters—and the



encomiums from no less than alfred Kazin, William styron, and Tennessee Williams. Critical reaction to the book was gener-ally enthusiastic, with some nay-saying, such as Orville Prescott’s complaint in the New York Times that the Wheelers are sim-

ply too “psychopathic” to be worthy of yates’s manifest gifts as a nov-elist. Commentators on the book, then and now, oscillate between two poles, seeing the book as either a powerful character study of two

weak-willed romantic egoists or a broader indictment, as yates himself put it, of “a general lust for conformity in this coun-try, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.” The book sold a modest 8,900 copies in its first incarna-tion, and it has survived over the decades as something of a cult novel, a hard to resolve yet equally hard to shake portrayal of the cultural contradictions of suburbia.

and then the merritt Parkway novel goes into hibernation for three decades. ameri-can fiction moved on to groovier subjects than mere domestic discontent, and the suburbs became largely the wholly owned subsidiary of the firm of Updike and Cheever, Ltd. The former brought the social acuity of a sometimes X-rated Wil-liam Dean Howells to the marital doings and undoings around Ipswich, massachu-setts, while the latter touched quotidian

so she devises a transparently daft plan to uproot the family to Paris, where she will work as a secretary to support them while her husband, in some ill-defined fashion, “finds himself.”

you really feel like smacking these peo-ple upside the head and telling them to get real, which is precisely what the novel’s designated truth teller, the mentally troubled son of their real estate agent, in a sense does. Twin adulter-ies (“I mean, you seem to be doing a pretty good imitation of madame Bovary here,” Frank, ever ready with a survey-course reference, at one point remarks) and a poorly timed preg-nancy lead to a tragic, heart-shredding conclusion.

as well-documented in Blake Bailey’s fine biography, Revolutionary Road’s roots are sunk deeply in yates’s own experi-ences. Like Frank Wheeler, yates worked in a dreary job as a Pr writer for rem-ington rand; like april Wheeler, his wife, sheila, devised a plan for them to escape to Paris for two years (which they actu-ally did). and much like the Wheelers, the yates family upped sticks from a Green-wich Village apartment to a ranch house in redding, Connecticut, where they lived an outwardly tranquil life riven by private marital tension. enthusiastically accepted by atlantic monthly Press, yates’s grim yet gleaming manuscript was given an excep-tional push for a first novel, receiving

You really feel like

smacking these people

upside the head and

telling them to get real.


GeraLD HOWarD58

joyless, thwarted, onanistic, or frankly per-verse. We are plainly meant to see the Hood family’s misery as both a mirror and an end result of the social fevers and disor-ders of the seventies.

after such knowl-edge, what forgiveness? Very little, clearly, from the author; the obviously autobiographical con-tent of The Ice Storm sug-gests that there were not many happy Thanksgiv-ings in the moody fam-

ily, nor was the author ever likely to have been invited to the new Canaan Library for a reading. (One of my former bosses, who lived in new Canaan in the seventies, vehemently denies the existence of key parties.) as unsparingly frank as moody is in this novel, it is hard to know what to do with such brutal honesty beyond being appalled by it. Unlike Frank and april Wheeler, who in yates’s hands reach an almost mythic stature, the members of the hapless Hood family seem preshrunk to the size of their respective miseries.

One thing is clear: The Ice Storm set the tone for the merritt Parkway nov-els to come. Prosperity, at least for some, returned to Connecticut and the nation, as finance became untethered from its former physical locations and hedge funds and investment firms set up shop in towns like Greenwich, making it one of the most hyperprosperous municipalities on the planet. I recently drove through Green-wich on the way to an author reading, and

life in Westchester County with the grace of his sublime prose and something of the Hudson Valley fabulism of Washington Irving. But the merritt Parkway novel came back with, quite literally, a vengeance in rick moody’s explo-sive 1994 The Ice Storm—a book that reads as if the children in the novels of yates and Wilson decided to wrest the nar-rative from their parents and channel something of Walter Benjamin’s malign animus against the bourgeois fam-ily in the bargain.

eighteen years after its first publication, The Ice Storm retains the power to dismay with its sheer familial misery and psycho-sexual creepiness. (In a sense, Keats told us this was coming.) Its plethora of seventies cultural detritus (shag rugs, Pet rocks, rose mary Woods, key parties) and overly commentatious, distinctly un-Jamesian narrative style are now more distracting than revelatory and have not aged well. But its angry and intimate indictment of feckless, divorce-prone parents makes it a signature Gen X novel and a proto-Fran-zen critique of the careless squandering of our freedoms. Famously set during an epic ice storm that blanketed the northeast the weekend after Thanksgiving Day 1973, it portrays the complete meltdown of the Hood family of new Canaan, Connecti-cut, acting out their terminal unhappiness in a series of sexual acts that are variously

One thing is clear:

The Ice Storm set the tone

for the Merritt Parkway

novels to come.



the protocols and delicacies of class in the plutocratic era of the one percent.

The merritt Parkway novel seems to reach a terminus of sorts in alison espach’s fairly horrifying 2011 novel, The Adults, set in Fairfield. espach sees moody and raises him plenty, producing a book that, to me, at least, becomes a species of suburban gothic. (“What kind of lunatic hangs pictures of asian women holding dildos?” a husband quite reasonably inquires of a marriage counselor’s décor.) Told in the voice of a girl named emily Vidal, who learns entirely too many things entirely too early, the book gets off to a grim start when, leaving her father’s fiftieth birthday party, she discov-ers their next-door neighbor in the process of hanging himself, successfully, from a tree. Things somehow go south from there, as the behaviors of putative grown-ups make abundantly clear that the book’s title is grimly ironic—no functioning, responsible adults, as we once understood them, are to be found, only overgrown children bent on satisfying their needs. I was particu-larly dismayed by espach’s portrayal of the almost feral and hypersexualized mean-girl culture of the local high school, which had me yearning for the tender consolations of Lord of the Flies. In freshman year (!) a group calling itself the Other Girls passes judg-ment on their classmates as, no kidding, Unfuckables. and all through high school and college emily sleeps with a high school english teacher she calls “mr. Basketball.” What emerges in this deadpan litany of alcoholism, adultery, depression, suicide, divorce, promiscuity, lockdowns, bullying,

the scent of BIG money wafting from the tastefully set-back estates and horse farms was overpowering. This development is perfectly captured by stephen amidon’s unjustly neglected 2004 novel, Human Cap-ital, which offers something of the plea-sures that John O’Hara’s books used to provide: a clear and convincing CaT scan of the class structure and pecking order of an american town and a near-surgical dis-section of the social, economic, and sexual forces underlying it.

at the top of the heap in Greeenwich-esque Totten Crossing in the spring of 2001 is Quint (as in Quant?) manning, a close-lipped and tightly wound hedge-fund manager; his wife, Carrie, channels her cultural energies and marital discon-tent by transforming an abandoned movie theater into an art house cinema. (activi-ties such as this are a fixture of these nov-els, usually the province of the women.) Their son, James, a Duke-bound golden boy with a drinking (and a father) prob-lem, is dating shannon, the daughter of Drew Hagel, a local realtor facing finan-cial difficulties. This romance (and a good tennis game) gives Hagel entrée into the mannings’ charmed circle, but a loom-ing financial crisis and a tragic car acci-dent set in motion a quite suspenseful plot in which it becomes clear that money is a solvent of ethics and that self-interest definitely trumps correct behavior. This is something american novelists have been demonstrating to us since Theodore Drei-ser, but amidon finds a way to make it new, with his uncanny understanding of


GeraLD HOWarD60

Henry miller, the war novelists, and even William Faulkner are weighed on the scales of affirmation and found wanting. Only Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar (!) makes the grade by Life’s literary standards.

If you can manage to put aside the ham-fisted cluelessness of the editorialist, the piece does put its finger on a persistent dis-connect between american life and ameri-can literature. We are—or at least were, until recently—an optimistic, forward-looking, practical people, not much given to introspection and self-doubt. yet our best writers gravitate toward precisely those aspects of our civilization that reflect least well upon us. Five of the six merritt Park-way novelists mentioned here lived in Fair-field County and their books draw upon close, on-the ground observation; stephen amidon grew up in northern new Jersey, but his father was a corporate executive and he knows the folkways of the upper middle class quite well. Their sense of the “some-thing hanging over us . . . that makes it hard to be happy” is no fabrication or Commie plot to demoralize the citizenry. But the good people of Fairfield County must, if they pay any attention to american fiction (and most of them may not), feel ill used, even libeled by it. They might, with some justice, retort, “If life here is so hellish, why does everybody want to live here?” a chorus of assent might well be heard from High-land Park, Palo alto, Buckhead, short Hills, the north shore, the main Line, et cetera.

The whole business is hard to square, frankly. I’ll give it some more thought the next time I’m on the merritt.

and plenty more is a portrait of a society so overstuffed with privilege and so conver-sant and comfortable with dysfunction that all boundaries of decency have been erased. The promise of american life, indeed.

The question that remains to be consid-ered—although the answer will forever elude us—is to what extent do these six novels actually reflect the facts and the feel of life in Fairfield County as it has been lived by its inhabitants over the past half century or more. We have to imagine (don’t we?) that hundreds of thousands of people have lived satisfying, successful, productive, upright lives there, engaged in meaningful work, graced by love and familial affection, returning to their communities more than they have been given. If so, they have escaped the attention of our novelists. But literature and sociology are distinctly sepa-rate fields of inquiry, and given the choice between happiness and contentment or misery and conflict, writers will head for the latter every time. It is what they do.

In 1955, Life magazine published an admonitory editorial about the american fiction of the period that became instantly notorious. Beginning with some conde-scending praise of sloan Wilson for pre-cisely the weakest aspect of his novel—its “happy ending”—it goes on to regis-ter bemusement at the disparity between american power, prosperity, and social equality and its hostile literature, “which sounds sometimes as if it were written by an unemployed homosexual living in a packing-box shanty.” nice. Truman Capote,


rOBIn rOmm134

O n A l i s O n l u r i e ’ s

The War Between the Tates

r o b i N r o m m

a reviewer for the New York Times once sug-gested that meg Wolitzer, who writes real-istic social novels with feminist concerns, is at her most comic when she is at her meanest. That line has stayed in my mind for years. How often do we consider the merits and joys of the wicked, the sharp, and the mean?

Writers talk so much about empathy. When a writer feels empathy for her char-acters, she creates a bridge between the reader and the created other. I heard this as a student in workshops and have said it as a teacher. It’s true, for the most part. no one wants to read a self-obsessed novel. Plus, unlike all the things you can’t teach

in creative writing classrooms, empathy can be modeled. It travels well, too. you can use it elsewhere.

But I think this earnest trait gets over-emphasized. What about the remarkable books whose strengths lie not in meanness (that’s a crude word standing in for some-thing finer), per se, but in their startlingly slanted, stinging judgments?

It’s a little ridiculous to feel possessive, to want to keep the writer I’m about to dis-cuss as my own private pleasure. I am tempted, though, to continue my preamble and make you wait for the heart of this particular artichoke. The author of the 1974 novel The War Between the Tates isn’t exactly obscure. alison Lurie won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1984 novel, Foreign Affairs. she’s authored eleven books of fic-tion, not to mention numerous nonfiction and children’s books. However, I hadn’t read her until prompted to by a friend last winter, which is both a shame (all those wasted years!) and a thrill. What a ride it’s been to look at our often humorous, poten-tially hopeless human situation through Lurie’s unsparing gaze.

I suppose I feel a kinship with Lurie because of her subject matter and her will-ingness to skewer. every novel I have ever fantasized about writing—the novel about the hippie cult, the novel about the ridicu-lous energy at artists’ colonies, the novel roasting academics, a satire about the state of heterosexual love—Lurie has already written. The day I went to look for her novels at Powell’s, they yipped at me from


135rOBIn rOmm

their shelf like a bunch of overjoyed dogs. I bought every single one.

meaty with plot, Lurie’s novels are also arch and witty. she has high expectations of her readers; she writes up to them, never down. But the most arresting thing about her is that she’s so wildly observant. nothing gets past her—no academic theory, no ges-ture, no political movement, no outfit or mustache or pigtail. and it’s not empathy with which she sifts through all this flot-sam. she has another task in mind: to criti-cize smartly, to comment on the absurdity of our collective endeavors—empathy be damned. The blurb on The War Between the Tates calls Lurie “a baleful comic artist . . . at her most corrosive.”

(“at her most corrosive!” That is a blurb to die for.)

The War Between the Tates is the story of erica and Brian Tate, a long-married couple living in the small college town of Corinth. erica, who has just made break-fast for her two teenage children, sits in the kitchen, disliking them:

In her whole life, she cannot remem-ber disliking anyone as much as she now sometimes dislikes her children . . . Jeffrey and matilda were beauti-ful, happy babies; charming toddlers; intelligent, lively, affectionate children . . . Then last year . . . they had begun to change; to grow rude, coarse, selfish, insolent, nasty, brutish, and tall. It is as if she is keeping a boarding house in a bad dream, and the children she had loved are turning into awful

lodgers—lodgers who paid no rent, whose leases could not be terminated.

The house, too, has turned against her. Once, “the acoustic permeability of this old house” meant erica could hear her children cry or murmur for her. But now it means that she cannot speak to her hus-band about the state of the children—or about anything, for that matter—with-out being overheard. We quickly come to understand that the life erica has culti-vated—that of a well-married mother—holds her prisoner. she’s a beautiful, edu-cated martyr with a dangerous resentment and a budding feminist consciousness.

Brian, on the other hand, harbors all the traits of a classic narcissist. He believes he was born for a greatness not yet manifest. (about his successful career as a political science professor, he wonders: “Why does he still discuss other men’s theories instead of his own?”) When we meet Brian, erica has just caught him in an embarrassing affair with a dim-witted, unattractive hip-pie student. Brian feels aggravated that he’s been caught, but equally aggravated by the conviction that he should have chosen a better mistress.

We might guess that all won’t go well for the Tates as they set about work-ing through the mess of infidelity. Lurie, though, with her particular sensibility, revi-talizes this classic situation. erica, under the guises of feminism and sisterhood, forces Brian to embrace his new respon-sibilities with his now pregnant mistress. In turn, Lurie forces us to look hard at


rOBIn rOmm136

love has disadvantages. sometimes [he] feels like a man with a new, overaffection-ate pet, whose constant and obvious devo-tion is half a source of satisfaction, half an embarrassment . . . he has to teach her to restrain herself in public: not to lick and paw him; to sit quietly.” and Lurie ensures that we know what to think of this mis-tress, who tells Brian that the head cloth she wears around her head “kind of, you know, keeps my brains together.” The pri-mary characters aren’t the only ones to misbehave. erica’s “independent” friend Danielle falls for a veterinarian after he sexually assaults her. (she marries him.)

True, these observations often come from the heads and hearts of Lurie’s char-acters, rather than from Lurie directly. But the accumulation of all this judgment, combined with the outsized misdeeds of characters in the name of their beliefs, is in itself a judgment on our culture—a verdict by Lurie that is as harsh, sharp, and damn-ing as it is artful.

“feminism.” at its worst, it can be a stand-in for “power struggle,” another ideology for flawed humankind to abuse.

The ruthlessness with which erica and Brian treat each other, and the societal norms and academic theories they use to justify their behaviors, is part of what makes The War Between the Tates a brainy, shiver-inducing read. But the novel also owes its success to the roughness with which Lurie treats her characters. Here’s Brian’s facial hair through erica’s gaze:

The mustache had been a deliber-ate effort; the sideburns appeared deviously . . . they merely began—as if on their own momentum—edging down the sides of his face a fraction of an inch at a time, like some geologi-cal formation. When they reached the level of his mouth they began to put out a sort of horizontal extension or spur on each cheek. They are an announcement to the whole world that Professor Tate wishes to appear younger, and less serious—to be seen as a “swinger.”

not only does he look like a fool, his folly runs deeper. The facial hair is an out-growth of an internal flaw: his wish to be perpetually young, perpetually desired. Lurie’s genius lies in the subtle judgment, the withering observation that uses com-edy to flirt with tragedy, as comedians do.

Brian feels a nagging disdain for his mistress. When thinking about her wor-ship of him, he muses that “unconditional


Barbara Ras

187

REliCS

If it is nothing to find dreams floodedWith tides going higher under a moonFuller than grief Then what can we makeOf rocks shattered on the shore

Of hummingbirds disappearing into mist over the waterFlying away from flowersLike souls of the just departedseagulls clamoring for their daily bread andI vow To keep the five bleached quahog shells From our day at the beach

The sixth couldn’t save youThough I tried to fill it with magicWhen I left it in your handBefore you left ushollowed out


POeTry / Barbara ras188188

Hermit crabs scrabble the sandIn search of larger homes some shapeThey can carry on their backs That fitsTheir particular hump and claws

meanwhile nothing I can spell Can containDeath of the everlasting kindand those were the pearls that were his eyes

repeats itself in my mind like the wrack lineThe ocean writes to keep its own time


210

among the gifts awaiting me on Christ-mas morning 1995 was a cookbook enti-tled Cooking with Friends—“Friends” as in Friends, the former Thursday-night nBC tent pole now in weeknight syndication,

which the most honest of us will admit to watching when nothing else is on. (Or when emerging from a bad trip: a friend of mine once successfully reoriented her-self to reality by watching an episode and

r e a d a b L e f e a s T

Ki

COOkiNG

WiTh FRiENDSKatie Arnold-Ratliff

A sitcom sets the table


211Cooking with Friends

repeating the mantra “monica is the clean one; Chandler is the mean one.”) I liked the book in 1995 because I liked the show (I was thirteen), but I like it now because its recipes are low-impact and surprisingly good. It’s full of meals that are doable on weeknights, or when you have a bad cold. This food is not splashy or innovative. It’s solid. It’s the toothsome coffee cake you eat in pajamas, or the sturdy lasagna you serve your brother-in-law. It’s the leftovers you actually eat the next day, nothing being lost in the reheat.

CWF arrived under the tree just as I was getting really serious about food, the way some girls get really serious about boys or ponies. I watched the entire Great Chefs franchise on PBs, nerded out hard-core on my Julia Child: Home Cooking with Master Chefs CD-rOm, and developed an enduring nonsexual crush on susan Feniger. right there with me for all of this was my aunt Karen—the woman who exposed me to both high-end kimchi and fried-baloney sandwiches, the woman who taught me to like sashimi at eight years old but who kept Frosted Flakes around for when I stayed over. she taught me to appreciate the highbrow stuff and the trashy crap in equal measure.

so I knew enough to discern that CWF’s recipes were exceedingly basic. What I didn’t know yet was that, whether or not we food snobs want to admit it, it’s simple fare and not fancy-pants cuisine that lingers most indelibly on the tongue. For example, I had a spectacular meal at Daniel two years ago, but when I say

“spectacular,” I’m just queuing up a mental reel of each dish. I remember the sweet-breads and duck terrine and oysters with seawater gelée in my head, not my mouth. But I can instantly taste the eight-dollar plate of arterially apocalyptic food I had at Cracker Barrel a while back—the mouth-feel of the Dumplins™, the juicy give of the fried okra, the shattering crust of the Chicken Fried Chicken. ask yourself what means more to you, what you can most eas-ily conjure—Le Bernardin’s buttery black bass or your aunt’s stuffed bell peppers (and my aunt makes a mean stuffed pep-per)—and you’ll get my point.

The Friends cookbook lands squarely in the middle of these two extremes and draws inspiration from both sides, which is why it’s great. I’ve moved from apart-ment to apartment, relocated across the country, sold off God knows how many tired old books for cash—but I’ve hung on to CWF for nearly two decades. (Though I will admit to having thrown away the dust jacket, lest anyone see the title.) I’ve made the pine nut cookies, and the Onion Tartlets à la monica, and the dated but tasty Peaches Poached in red Wine with Lemon and Fennel. I’ve baked mar-cel’s Banana Bread (named, of course, for ross’s capuchin) at least a dozen times, and—God help me—the Trendy Tiramisu. I doubt I told my husband this, but for our first Thanksgiving together, I re-created the book’s entire holiday menu, from the cranberry-orange relish to the apple crisp. and each time I used a recipe, I sifted through background blurbs about each star ©

iLL

us

Tr

aT

ion

by

sc

oT

T M

en

ch

in


KaTIe arnOLD-raTLIFF212

(“Lisa Kudrow, who has a degree in biology from Vassar . . .”), ancient cast photos (one nearly weeps to see the young, larger-nosed Jennifer aniston and the poignantly fresh-faced matthew Perry), and, in the margins, quotes from the first season (“Ugly naked Guy’s got gravity boots!”).

after all, this cookbook isn’t really a cookbook—or at least, it is one only incidentally. It’s a marketing conceit, designed to provide an easy holiday gift for a niece or neighbor (or daughter, evidently). In fact, its whole rai-son d’être seems to have been the Christmas sea-son of 1995, for which the book was rushed into print. so says Bryan Curtis, who green-lit the project as the vice president of marketing at rutledge Hill Press (and who was charmingly unfazed by my bar-rage of questions about a tie-in to a show that ended eight years ago). “We’d done a number of TV-themed cookbooks,” Cur-tis told me. “Aunt Bee’s Mayberry Cookbook, Mary Ann’s Gilligan’s Island Cookbook, Alice’s Brady Bunch Cookbook. We also did ones based on The Young and the Restless and The Beverly Hillbillies.” amy Lyles Wilson, now a theologian and a columnist for a nashville magazine, was the rutledge Hill editor asked to write the text—which involved reading the scripts sent over by Warner Bros. to find story arcs that could translate into menu items. (ross being dumped by his pregnant lesbian wife = a chapter on

comfort foods.) Wilson doesn’t remem-ber much about the project, other than the process being “a delight”; to her, it was just an assignment. But Curtis recalls that it was a bona fide best seller; that it inspired two moments of levity on late-night talk shows (Leno monologued about it on one, and David schwimmer dissed

it on another); and that he himself used it for years (“The pepper jack crackers and the cherry tomatoes marinated in pepper vodka are great for parties.”). “some of the food was from the show,” Curtis told me. “after all, monica was

a chef. and the rest Jack Bishop came up with.” Bishop, who developed the recipes, has all but scrubbed his involvement with the book from his bio—which reveals that he helped launch Cooks Illustrated and set the tasting protocols for america’s Test Kitchen, the venerable lab in which food scientists work toward a more perfect pan-cake and the like. In other words, Bishop is legit, and it would seem that he believes Cooking with Friends is not.

It’s a shame Bishop doesn’t embrace CWF in his CV. He ought to claim it proudly. Whatever lameness or cyni-cism may be inherent in its packaging, it’s a worthy cookbook, as evidenced by many incredulous amazon.com reviews (“my wife and I still make the maca-roni and cheese . . . it’s just the per-fect recipe for some reason”; “The recipes

Your mouth is a

fundamentally stable

environment: you will

always love to eat the

things you love to eat.


213Cooking with Friends

I’m no longer ten years old—I’ve eaten all kinds of crazy, wonderful things in the twenty years since I was—but that doesn’t mean I don’t still love those simple, homey stuffed peppers. When it comes to food, what matters, what lasts, is the good, mid-dle-of-the-road stuff like that found in Cooking with Friends. That’s the stuff people crave. I’ve never thought to myself, I could go for some seawater gelée, but I’ve sure as hell wished I could come home to a platter of mrs. Tribbiani’s roast Chicken.

Before that Christmas morning, my preoccupation with food and cooking had been a solitary one, explored while holed up in my bedroom, making lists of res-taurants to visit and poring over martha stewart’s collected recipes, but more than that, it had been wrongheaded in its esti-mation of what constitutes worthy cuisine. I thought good food had to be complex and intimidating, but the Friends cookbook widened my perspective: it showed me that eating well is mostly about simplicity, about approachability and inclusion. and with its focus on, well, friendship, the book makes it plain that cooking is not solitary at all. Food is about enjoying the company of those you care about—those who’ll be there for you, because you’re there for them, too.

after I spoke to amy Lyles Wilson and Bryan Curtis, and after I learned that Jack Bishop is a respected food professional who evidently needed some extra pocket money in 1994, and after I took a quick glance at the book and was reminded that matt LeBlanc used to be a Levi’s model

are more complex and refined than you would expect.”). This cookbook should have sucked, because it didn’t need to be good—all it needed to do was exist, to be visible in various B. Dalton outlets in various malls that winter, to sell enough to cover its pro-duction costs. What it’s done instead is sit on an improbable number of bookshelves for sixteen years, doing its part to bring people sustenance and joy.

maybe that sounds overblown. But how often does a cleverly timed piece of mer-chandising really last, and really mean something to someone? These things are born to die, created only to be discarded as tastes evolve. yet this artifact of the mid-nineties remains, and even, in the case of a half dozen recipes, transcends. (Despite the name, I’m especially devoted to the monkey Lovin’ mocha mouthfuls, the rec-ipe for which appears here.) If, in our throwaway culture, that doesn’t move you, I don’t know what would.

There’s a parallel fickleness in the food world—we eager eaters jump wholeheart-edly onto the bandwagon du jour, and then claim to tire of our pastel-colored iced cupcakes and braised pork belly and authentic ramen once the new new thing arrives. But we’re not actually tired of cupcakes and bacon and noodles. (If you are, I suggest you undergo medical test-ing.) We’re leaving behind the fad, not the food. your mouth is a fundamentally stable environment: you will always love to eat the things you love to eat. It’s not 1991 anymore, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still like sundried-tomato pesto. and


KaTIe arnOLD-raTLIFF214

“Oh, yes, of course I watched Friends,” she said. “I loved it. I still do. I never cared for monica, though—she was just too fussy.”

and that matthew Perry’s father famously starred in a series of Old spice commer-cials, a question occurred to me. so I gave my aunt Karen a call.

regular muffin tin, it’s fine—just let the cupcakes bake a little longer, until a knife stuck into the center emerges clean.)

melt the butter and chocolate together in a double boiler (or, like me, in the microwave), stirring until smooth. set mixture aside to cool slightly. stir in the sugar until smooth. Whisk in the egg, liqueur, and espresso powder. Fold in the flour and chopped walnuts.

spoon the batter into the prepared tin, filling cups about three-quarters full. Place a walnut half in the center of each cup. Bake about twenty minutes. Let the cupcakes cool in the tin for five minutes, then turn them out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Note: If cupcakes without frosting make no sense to you, (a) I understand, and (b) feel free to make use of those tubs of frosting at the grocery store. I always do.

4 tablespoons unsalted butter2 ounces semisweet chocolate (I use

scharffen Berger, and I double it to 4 ounces)

1/3 cup sugar (I always substitute brown sugar—in this and in all desserts)

1 large egg1 tablespoon coffee liqueur, such as Kahlua

(though a tablespoon of brewed espresso does just fine in a pinch)

1 teaspoon instant espresso powder (though I like to use actual coffee grounds, for the texture—which may be an acquired taste)

1/3 cup flour1/3 cup chopped walnuts, plus 12 walnut

halves

(The recipe doesn’t call for it, but I add a 1/2 teaspoon of kosher salt and a teaspoon of vanilla extract.)

Preheat the oven to 350. Generously grease a twelve-cup mini-muffin tin and set it aside. (If you only have a

Monkey Lovin’ Mocha Mouthfuls

(adapted from Cooking with Friends)


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