![]() And the triumph of Friend’s extended foray into family history rests on the soulful humanity of his cast. “Cheerful Money” doubles as a bittersweet family portrait and deceptively subtle ethnography of a people harder to know than “The Official Preppy Handbook” lets on.Īchieving perfection proved as impossible for the Puritans as it did for their descendants. And people have bought it, all the while suppressing their nostalgia for a culture of privilege and exclusion that’s supposed to be bad.įew understand this phenomenon better than New Yorker staff writer Tad Friend, who has written the memoir of the season–and one for all time. They have reduced a rich heritage to a sartorial fetish that has nothing to do with the ethnonym “Wasp” (a term most Wasps shun as a vulgarity). For all the derision heaped upon them, a surprising number of Americans harbor fantasies of belonging to this enfeebled aristocracy. Or so the standard mantra goes.īut seen from afar, Wasps look pretty good. Exiled to crumbling seaside houses with their shaggy dogs and tarnished silver, the country’s former titans now do penance for their longtime opposition to the march of diversity. They may not be dead, but they have faded into irrelevance. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants may be the last acceptable American ethnic group you can joke about without losing your job. Little, Brown and Company, 368 pages, $14.99 “Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor”
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