Month: March 2007

I am so grateful to have read Calvin Trillin’s brief but wonderful tribute to his wife Alice. As he says, all his books were written for, evaluated by Alice. No better memoriam could have been written.

She was someone I would have loved to have known, although I would have envied her beauty and writing ability. In reading about her I felt I shared to some extent in a friendship. Her goals as a parent were familiar, though better executed than mine: to help her children become what they wanted to be.
Thank you, Calvin, for sharing Alice with us.

Elaine recommends reading Travels with Alice about trips to Europe with his wife to set the stage for both Calvin and his relationship with Alice.  She says, “I could read Trillin time after time after time.  He is a magician.”

Michael Cunningham skillfully intertwines the interior lives of three women: Virginia Woolf, shortly before her depression-induced suicide, Clarissa, whom her gay erstwhile boyfriend calls “Mrs. Dalloway,” and Laura, depressed enough with her life as a wife and mother to seriously consider suicide.

Clarissa’s friend Richard, crippled with AIDS, in fact slips out of a fifth story window. She recalls the moment of his first youthful kiss as the happiest of her lesbian life. Virginia Woolf, developing the character Mrs. Dalloway, decides she will recognize the first kiss of her lesbian lover as the happiest moment of her life.

All three spend a great deal of time trying to live in the moment, to seize the present and call it happiness, with only momentary success. So the hours slip by.

These characters and their families are brought to life in elegantly simple prose. But the overall mood is not one of joie de vivre.

Elaine says she recalls this as a fine, serious novel verging on the somber that she is glad to have read but doesn’t want to read again.  A good movie, which has been shown at RiverWoods, was made of it.