SALON

Friday, May 12, 2000 4:00 PM UTC

“The Fundamentals of Play” by Caitlin Macy

The rich have rules but they won't explain them, according to a smart novel about life after the Ivy League.

By

Topics: Books,

Old money never dies. It just lies low for a while, resurfacing when we’re not looking. And we thought the brave new world of instant, media-friendly celebrity had killed all that. Madonna, Oprah and the Donald have more clout, not to mention larger stock portfolios, than the Biffs and Buffys of old, right?

Maybe so, maybe not. Like a furtive underground movement, old money operates outside the purview of the mainstream, outlasting Nixon and Clinton, bull market and bear, swinging ’60s and buttoned-up ’80s. High society plays by its own time-honored rules, knowing full well that the rest of us upstarts don’t count.

Reading Caitlin Macy’s fine first novel, “The Fundamentals of Play,” is a bit like being invited, unawares, to the party. Unless we’ve prepped at Hotchkiss or Miss Porter’s, been introduced to society at the New York Yacht Club or inducted into Yale’s Skull and Bones, we don’t know quite what to make of things.

The two most intriguing characters in this novel find themselves in just that quandary, though in very different ways. George Lenhart, the 23-year-old narrator fresh out of Dartmouth, toils as a 100-hour-a-week peon in Wall Street corporate finance. He is the soul of ambivalence, at once in awe of old money and resentful that he’s not part of it. What would solidify his status is marriage with Kate Goodenow, the object of his fascination since their boarding-school days at Chatham. A creature of her social class, Kate embodies that indefinable point where breeding, insouciance and a sense of entitlement intersect.

For all Kate’s appeal as the unobtainable mystery woman, she isn’t the other character of greatest interest here. That’s Harry Lombardi. Harry is the author’s Gatsby in the making. Not that he’s rich, yet, or a gangster at all. But he’s very unpolished, very outri, every inch a striver in a culture that prides itself on hardly trying at all.

At Dartmouth, George had fallen under the spell of the arrogant and unlikable Chatland “Chat” Wethers. Chat’s attraction? His family had the money that George’s family once had. Because George’s father had fallen into something close to genteel poverty as a boarding-school headmaster, George was forced to work his way through college, until Chat rescued (and enslaved) him with a loan. For a while Harry was their sometime companion — a public-school kid from Long Island on the fast track to success — until he dropped out. That he was a devout Catholic he couldn’t bear to tell anyone. Eager to learn the games the upper class plays, Harry was subjected to their snickers behind his back.

Here’s the Catch-22: No one is going to tell Harry, or anyone else, the rules. But if you don’t know the rules, you can’t play. Unless you absorb them like mother’s milk when young, you’ll probably never catch on. Above all they stress a cool, understated elegance and ease. Nonchalance is as essential as grace. In a crisis you keep a stiff upper lip. At a party you never run out of tonic.

Kate may be an alluring enigma — certainly the men who swarm about her think so — but the boy in her boarding-school past is even more so. The son of a poor Maine lobsterman, Nick Beale was the natural aristocrat who instinctively knew all the rules, charmed all the girls, won all the sailing competitions. Sent to Chatham after his father’s death by the rich folks (including Kate’s parents) who summered where he lived year-round, Nick proceeded to destroy his future by depriving Kate of her virginity. A decade later Kate still can’t get over losing him. Mostly from afar, Nick haunts this story as a ghostly counterpoint to the gods of ambition and money.

Macy frames her story as a kind of moral coming-of-age tale, with George learning that a steady cultivation of irony can’t shield this crowd from life’s blows. He moves from uncritical acceptance of the rules to a more mature comprehension of their limitations. His eyes opened, he can begin to see Kate, as we do, as shallow, complacent and snobbish.

Macy’s portrait of prematurely conservative rich kids (“We ought to have wanted to start a revolution,” George muses; “instead we bought cocktail shakers”) is richly evocative. Her narrative swings gracefully from present to past and back, slowly revealing the secrets in the shadows. In the restrained, rueful voice of George, this subtly modulated prose acknowledges its debt to the likes of Richard Ford, Ethan Canin and Susan Minot.

Certainly we can quibble here and there. Kate doesn’t seem nearly smart or intellectually curious enough to have made it through Yale. And how deeply can an aborted high school romance really resonate after you’ve outgrown puppy love? Still, not even a touch of melodrama near the end could dilute my pleasure. And I detest rich spoiled brats as much as anyone.

Dan Cryer is a book critic for Newsday. More Dan Cryer.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills. "In an economy where we’re all in the same boat, one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when the government cuts spending, it reduces people’s income, leading to less business, more unemployment, and a vicious spiral of slowing down the economy."
328 points329 points | 270 comments
vote
FBI reportedly joins Bachmann campaign finance probe
261 points262 points | 23 comments
vote
Jon Karl makes things worse: He regrets “inaccurate” Benghazi email but says his story based on it “still entirely stands.” Really. ABC News?
225 points226 points | 31 comments
vote
Austerity Kills: Brian McArdle, a 57-year-old man who had had two strokes and could barely walk, was found "fit for work" by a government subcontractor, and had his benefits stopped. He died the next day.
107 points108 points | 11 comments
vote
“Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was.
83 points84 points | 16 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations