- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Anchor (July 17 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0385721129
- ISBN-13: 978-0385721127
- Product Dimensions: 13.1 x 1.6 x 20.2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 227 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #806,492 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
"I was guilty enough already, guilty of the same old thing since grade school: guilty of having come from a family that had had the lack of foresight--the poor taste, really--to come down in the world. It was almost anti-American, losing money the way we had." So muses George Lenhart, the ruefully ironic narrator of The Fundamentals of Play, Caitlin Macy's debut novel about money, class, and twentysomething relationships in the 1990s. Set in New England and New York City, this tale follows its characters from an old world of public schools and Maine summer houses, where the mention of money is vulgar but the lack of it even more so, into the brazen world of the new economy, where up-and-comers with no "name" are changing the rules of the game.
Before having come to work in the city, nothing much had threatened the sheltered and well-heeled lifestyles of the pedigreed Lenhart, his wealthy college roommate Chat Wethers, and their mutual childhood friend, the classically aloof Kate Goodenow. Nothing, that is, except for a shared (and silent) envy of Kate's high school boyfriend, Nick Beale, the poor "year-rounder" from the Maine coastal village turned boarding-school beneficiary turned pot-smoking dropout with exceptional sailing prowess and a passion for the Caribbean. Nick represents life lived without a script, and his story weaves in and out of the others' with a spontaneity that they so patently lack. His is a known spontaneity, though, and when the less definable one of skill, ambition, and new wealth--in the form of socially inept computer wizard Harry Lombardi--enters their sphere, the threads of the old world begin to fray. George looks on, bemused, as his class-conscious friends make careless (but transparently desperate) attempts to adjust their values, loyalties, and relationships.
Macy is adept at capturing the nuances of this last generation of aristocrats, caught between a desire for the past's fading gentility and the pressures of a faster game with a less rigid code of conduct. As George wryly admits, "It is hard to be reckless and still have one's shirts starched." Macy's language occasionally reflects the incongruous juxtaposition of these two worlds, mixing words like "foppishly" and "fleece" rather clumsily together, and her narrator speaks in a vernacular that seems far older than his mere 23 years, conjuring up visions of a Wharton-era New York rather than the city of the last decade. Her eye for odd details is deliciously surreptitious, however, and always viciously acute: she can paint sideline characters' entire personalities with one tidy turn of phrase, such as "Her face was tan--the whole party was filled with parents who had better tans than their children--and she wore pink lipstick that sat on her lips and beamed when they beamed." The Fundamentals of Play rides along on such observations, rewarding its readers with a glimpse into a (thankfully) disappearing world. --S. Ketchum --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
"The words never matter, in books or on dates," says George Lenhart, the bemused narrator of Macy's clever and thoroughly entertaining debut novel. "[I]t is the tone that survives." Long after the final page, Macy's tone, elegant and ironic, does survive, but so do her vibrant characters and their youthful hijinks. Set in the early '80s, just after the Pam Am Building became the MetLife, Macy's novel follows a small set of Ivy Leaguers as they make their way in New York City. At the heart of this set is Kate Goodenow, the anorexic rich girl whose sharpest critical word is "un-fun." Though suspect in other women's eyes, Kate is deeply alluring to men, from George to his college roommate Chatland Wethers to Harry Lombardi, the middle-class Dartmouth dropout who surprises everyone by making it big as a high-tech venture capitalist. George, whose family has lost its money but not its good name, seems to know that Kate will always remain beyond his reach. Indeed, wealthy, upper-crust Chat is unofficially engaged to her when the novel opens. Kate, however, somehow falls for Harry, who is short and stout and possesses a Long Island accent. If Harry's courtship of Kate turns her clubbish set on its head, it also rocks Harry's hometown buddy, Cara McLean, the girl who taught him how to smoke when they were in junior high, and she does her best to upset the relationship. The recurrent trope is play (playing roles, playing Hearts, simply playing), and the novel turns on just who is playing for keeps. While the shadow of Fitzgerald falls across this novel, Macy has the good sense to gently mock the congenitally wealthy and to allow hardworking Harry his financial success. The author's wit is sharp, her word play is keen and even as she lets George play one last bittersweet hand with Kate, Macy never betrays her clear-sighted recognition that old money is simply that: old. 6-city author tour. Film rights to Scott Rudin. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
stick with the original,
By A Customer
Ce commentaire est de: The Fundamentals of Play: A Novel (Paperback)
This book attempted an ambitious feat - to transport "The Great Gatsby" to the present day, but the author's reach was higher than her grasp. The characters behaved more like thirtysomethings - and yes, I do know people of the same class in real life, and they definitely do not behave like these characters. Anyway, the characters were for the most part, tissue thin, dull, and/or unlikeable, especially the woman for whom we were supposed to believe most of the males had been carrying a torch for since prep school. Yet, other reviewers have raved over this book, and its "fine writing" so maybe it's worth a shot.
2.0 out of 5 stars
jaunty? please.,
By Frank F. Tu (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
Ce commentaire est de: The Fundamentals of Play: A Novel (Paperback)
I've read Gatsby. In fact, I've read everything of Fitzgerald's, the letters the short stories. I don't think Ms. Macy necessary has, but she has read Gatsby. Reading this book reminds me of those Star Wars ripoffs that spread out like a virtual diaspora after the initial trilogy was completed, where there seemed a desparate need to continue the legacy of a great story that alas, had come to an end. They were all plagued with these italicized voiceovers, which paraphrased lines from the movies. "The Force is strong within my family. I have it, my father has it. My sister has it." And so on.Macy, sadly, despite her Yale/Columbia lineage seems content to do the same with TFOP. Her use of the word jaunty, along with the word chin, recur with the sad frequency of someone who read the description of Jordan Baker a time too many. And the plot is practically ganked straight from Gatsby. The descriptions of how lousy it is to be poor, educated and a manhattanite are straight out of the soliloquy that Nick delivers as he is contemplating Broadway at dusk. Even worse, the dialogue that comes out of these characters is sad, uninspired, and even if accurate, virtually unreadable. If you want to read a book that does gatsby justice, I suggest picking up The Catcher in the Rye, instead.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another appointment in Samarra,
By lb136 "lb136" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
Ce commentaire est de: The Fundamentals of Play: A Novel (Paperback)
Two-thirds of the way through Caitlin Macy's elegant, playfully dark comedy, "The Fundamentals of Play," her narrator, George Lenhart, Dartmouth graduate from an old WASP family that's fallen on hard financial times and now a financial analyst on Wall Street, sums up his generation, and the book's theme. Twenty-something in the early 1980s, George is narrating the book from the perspective of the turn of the century but he is writing about events during the summer New York's least-loved skyscraper, the Pan Am Building, was sold and became the Met Life building. George observes: "we were the last generation of the century to come of age, and the first one that wanted to be as much like our parents' as possible. We ought to have started a revolution; instead we bought cocktail shakers."Macy, in a manner Jane Austen and Edith Wharton might well have admired, has George describe the adventures of the slim ash blonde Dartmouth graduate (she's two years older than he is) Kate Goodnow. Her family is old money and book centers around who she will marry. Fellow grad Chat Weathers, the "not our kind" software entrepreneur Harry Lombardi (he has a mobile phone when they're still considered geeky and the era's so _not_ Internet ready computers display green pixels on a dark grey screen), or neo-hippie Nick Beale, who spends his time sailing. For Kate (and Macy makes you keep wondering why any of these men would desire her to the point of nervous breakdown) courtship is merely another game to be played. She is, we learn, determined to be the first in her set to get married, and so she sets about doing just that. Comparisons with "Gatsby" are inevitable, of course, but I think that's reaching too high. However, Macy may well be tipping her hat to a contemporary of Fitzgerald when narrator George tells us that one of the characters wants to bring back the old phone exchanges like "PLaza 5 and MUrray Hill 4." To say nothing of Butterfield 8? But no matter. Macy's touch is assured (maybe you'll have difficulty believing this is her first novel or that she's as young as she looks in her photograph). The book needs no such comparisons at all. Macy has mastered the elements of style: "The Fundamentals of Play" reads as if Macy dipped a stiletto in hydrofluoric acid and etched her words on a glass plate.
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