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The Fundamentals of Play: A Novel, by Caitlin Macy
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"Kate was what you wanted, somehow, in this infinitely ironic age. She was the kind of girl about whom other girls used to say, 'All right, so she's thin but,' trying vainly to suss out the appeal. And even now, when her name comes up, and with it the sulky protest it invariably evokes--'She's not that great'--I do not feel compelled to argue in her defense."
Some fiction debuts have remarkably strong stories, some have refreshing new voices, some have perfect cultural timing. The Fundamentals of Play is that literary rarity which has all three.
George Lenhart is, chronically, in love with Kate Goodenow. So is Nick Beale, the working-class son of a Maine lobsterman from the town where Kate spent her childhood summers. So is Chat Wethers, an old-money friend of George's from Dartmouth. And so is Harry Lombardi, a brilliant, startlingly successful, but socially awkward Dartmouth upstart who has been trying to enter this circle for years.
It is George who tells the interwoven stories of these five young people, some of whom, in their lineage or finances, represent the last gasp of the old Northeastern Upper Class. Starting with the year after college, when they all land in Manhattan, George describes the good times and disappointments, ambition and manners, sexual secrets and money-cursed friendships, that have tied these people to one another for a lifetime. He tells of Nick's charismatic past and drug-ridden present, and he shows the snobbery and avarice that lurk in Kate's background--in stark contrast to her ineffable allure. And as George tells these stories (and observes Harry's spectacular rise in the new, as-yet-unnamed phenomenon of the Internet), he implicitly chronicles the end of an era and the emergence of a new definition of class--just as The Fundamentals of Play represents the emergence of a distinctive new talent in American fiction.
- Sales Rank: #3496302 in Books
- Published on: 2000-05-23
- Released on: 2000-05-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.09" h x 6.82" w x 9.61" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
Amazon.com Review
"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
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.
From Library Journal
In the tradition of 1930s fiction, a crowd of wealthy, WASPy prep-school friends descend on New York City after college to drink vast quantities of alcohol and "have fun" until middle age overtakes them. The center of this crowd is Kate Goodenow, who sets the standard for the group. Enter outsider Harry Lombardi, an ambitious (and therefore contemptible) social-climbing boor, who also happens to be a Catholic and a computer genius. He is on the brink of launching an Internet browser that will make him wealthy. Kate takes up with Harry for the novelty and shock value of it, going so far as to agree to marry him. Fate intervenes in the form of Cara, who announces that she is carrying Harry's baby. In the inevitable scene when Kate tries to "buy off" Cara, tragedy strikes, rearranging the whole cast of characters and their plans. Macy writes masterfully, creating vivid and unflattering pictures of these vapid lives. She tries too hard to create intrigue, hinting at but withholding for too long the resolution of the tragedy, but overall this is a very readable novel.DJoanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Providence
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Another appointment in Samarra
By lb136
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.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Well written but boring!
By A Customer
I usually enjoy reading a young writers first novel. I found The Fundamentals of Play to be well written but not at all interesting. I could have put the book down half way and never wondered how it turned out. I also believe the Ms. Macy should have had her characters attend Yale not Dartmouth since Yale was her Alma Mater. Her Dartmouth background material was superficial....example no one would leave Dartmouth at the end of the term in a cab. My advice would be to skip this book.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Dont Kill the Messenger
By A Customer
Fundamentals of Play is a fantastic book. It is the perefect combination of wit, play, engaging story and social commentary. Macy's insights about New York culture and her obvious kinship with the city, its architecture and atmosphere make this a true city novel in the best sense. Those who critique Macy for writing about the wealthy miss the point. The wealthy, or those apsiring to be so, are fit and fascinating subjects for novels, or so Austen, Fitzgerald, Fielding rightly demonstrated. The human condition is compelling no matter what someone's net worth.
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