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This brief, beautiful book is a tribute to Alice Trillin, the author's wife, who died in New York City after a long battle with cancer on September 11, 2001. In this moving series of essays about Alice's character and person, Calvin Trillin never notes the coincidence of her death with the destruction of the World Trade Center, perhaps understandably reluctant to compare the two events. In fact, he avoids anything mawkish or overly sentimental and makes no overt plays for the reader's sympathy, preferring to let his fond illumination of Alice's life speak for itself.
Trillin has been a prolific writer for a lifetime, and many of his readers already felt a kinship with the woman he admits he sometimes portrayed as a "dietician in sensible shoes." Nobody has skewered family life and travails (traveling, eating, parenting) with as much gentle wit as he has, and given what he calls his "sitcom view" of their life, it's only natural that readers may have a skewed concept of the woman he married in the late 1960s and raised two daughters with. So many of his light, funny articles have featured her as straight man --- a kind of George Burns to his Gracie Allen.
In this book, Trillin fleshes out this adored woman, presenting Alice Stewart Trillin as a teacher, writer, activist and lecturer in her own right. She was straightforward in her views and not afraid to voice her opinion, regardless of the company. "If we'd had the misfortune to live in a milieu that called on me to work my way up in a corporation and on Alice to be the supportive and diplomatic and perfectly behaved corporate wife, I sometimes told her, I would never have emerged from middle management."
Alice was also beautiful, and while she shunned as extravagant some luxuries like fancy cars, she loved nice clothes and travel. She adored her children and was fanatical about attending every school event. A brush with death from lung cancer in 1976 shaped her life thereafter, increasing her devotion to helping others with cancer and sharpening her priorities.
Trillin's memories of Alice are at once inspiring, heartwarming, clever and sad. The book, much of which already has appeared in The New Yorker, is organized into short chapters about her beauty, passion for the English language, parental devotion, forthrightness and fortitude. Where appropriate, Trillin includes some of their dear friends' poignant remembrances to illustrate his points, but he also peppers the text with notes from readers who knew her only through his writing. "Yet I got a lot of letters like the one from a young woman in New York who wrote that she sometimes looked at her boyfriend and thought, 'But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?'"
In Trillin's prose, love has always sparkled just around the corner from wit --- and it hasn't stopped sparkling. From the evidence of this book, it's abundantly clear that the young woman's anxiety is well founded. Few are lucky enough to love (or be loved) as long and as well as Calvin Trillin loved his Alice.
--- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman Nicol
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