The Fundamentals of Play: A Novel
by Caitlin Macy

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Book Reviews of The Fundamentals of Play: A Novel

Book Review: Another appointment in Samarra
Summary: 5 Stars

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.

Summary of The Fundamentals of Play: A Novel

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

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