Word: trillins
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AUTHOR: CALVIN TRILLIN...
...author tips his hand: "It has been my experience," he writes, "that almost anyone who asks to speak at a funeral or memorial service wants to talk about himself." So it appears; this luminous valedictory centers on the late Roger ("Denny") Hansen. But it is as much about Calvin Trillin as it is about his classmate, the golden boy of Yale...
Back in the Eisenhower era, as one undergraduate put it, Yalies viewed the future as "Stairway to Heaven, moving up through the clouds on a blissful escalator." Trillin, a strangely appealing mixture of Jewish arriviste and Midwestern hick, entered college without ever having heard of Dostoyevsky or Greenwich, and he figured to stop ascending early in the journey. Denny was expected to keep on climbing. Champion athlete, top-ranking student, Rhodes scholar, subject of a Life magazine piece, he was discussed seriously as a potential candidate for the presidency. Forty years later, after a life of obscurity and pain...
What went wrong? Trillin, a New Yorker staff writer, sets out to find the truth, armed only with his wit and a handful of clues. En route Trillin recalls a time when striving was considered something a gentleman just didn't do. After all, why should he? Postgraduate privileges were guaranteed to go along with his Yale sheepskin. And then came the '60s: the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, the sexual revolution. "There is a common feeling among people my age," Trillin says, "that somehow the rules got changed in the middle of the game...
...Trillin candidly describes his own fumbling attempts to adjust: "I was remarkably easy to fool." Others, like Denny, never found their feet again. His jobs grew less significant, and influential friends dropped away. He never married. At a Big Chill session, one mourner suggests that the deceased had "unreasonably high standards." Another concludes that he was a suppressed homosexual. Still another observes that despite the scholar-athlete's "million-dollar smile," he was an emotional basket case, suffering from clinical depression...