Book Reviews

The Fundamentals of Play: A Novel

Random House, 333 pp., $24.95

I began to truly dislike The Fundamentals of Play, by Caitlin Macy, right about the time that George, the narrator, runs into Kate Goodenow, the novel's heroine, while drinking highballs at the Town Club in Manhattan. My snooty-meter was already sending off warning bells, but when Kate embraces George, and whispers in his ear, "Why, it's the most fun possible," I could feel myself wincing. Who in the world would ever say, "Why, it's the most fun possible?" And for that matter, who drinks highballs?

George has just graduated from Dartmouth. He spends his days working at an investment bank, and his evenings drinking gin and playing cards with his college and boarding school chums. His friends have names like Chat, Toff, Craig-O, and Nicky (also known as Nicko). George and all his friends are madly in love with Kate, an icy blonde. It's too much. For the first few chapters, Macy's dated dialogue and her narrator's utter lack of irony made me want to scream.

But then a strange thing happened. Among all the cocktails and Jazz Age shenanigans, I began to be fascinated by the characters. I stopped guffawing every time Kate said something like, "Isn't it dirty and awful? But it's fun. It's so, so, so, so fun." I started forgetting that nobody talks as if they inhabited an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel anymore, and that everybody knows the icy blonde can only lead to heartbreak. By the time Harry Lombardi, the social outcast turned millionaire arrives on the scene, I was hooked.

For rising above the thick irony that covers most novels today, and for reviving archetypal characters as compelling (if also as one-dimensional) as Daisy Buchanan and Gatsby, Macy deserves credit. She also tells a damn good story. As George winds his way through his first few years out of school, years in which he explores what he wants from love and work, the reader becomes caught up in the old scandals taking place within George's circle of friends (will Nicko ruin Kate's engagement party?) and the new hierarchy (will Harry's crazy idea about a World Wide Web pay off?). Macy pens a lively, if pretentious, tribute to the days before the Internet changed everything. As George says, in a toast at the Town Club, "To our generation ... because we have nothing better to do." Buy that man a highball.