Sharon Barrow Wilfong's Reviews > About Alice

Maybe I should give this three stars, but if someone asked me how it was, I'd have to say, "It was OK."

On the one hand it is a poignant eulogy for the author's late wife, really more like an elegy in that it is like reading a love poem. On the other hand, I did not find his wife's attributes all that sympathetic.

Calvin Trillin is a writer for the New Yorker. His wife, Alice, served as his muse and the subject of many of his articles. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1976, but battled it until she passed away from heart failure in 2001. Her death was largely overlooked by the media due to her passing being on the same day as the 9/11 attacks.

I did enjoy reading this book in that Trillin's love for his wife effuses from every page. She was outspoken, opinionated, went out for the things she believed in fighting for and unapologetically lived as she pleased.

This is all well and good. The above paragraph would be a fair description of me. And maybe it's my own strong opinions that caused me to dislike Alice, in spite of her husband's tender remembrances.

All of her opinions, while lauded by her husband for their bravery and altruism, stayed firmly inside the bounds of popular causes. You could have replaced Alice with any celebrity and the politics, charities, etc...would have been the same.

She wished she could impose an "Alice Tax". A tax that would force people to live modestly. She doesn't clearly define what she means by modest. She lived in a brownstone in Greenwich Village. Most Americans could not afford to live within an hour's radius of New York City. And she kept an expensive wardrobe...and complained when her husband booked them in a small hotel while they were in Japan. Like most rich people who think we should give all our money to the government so they can redistribute it to the poor, like congress, she conveniently excludes herself from the practical application of her ideologies.

If every person who believed in redistribution, especially rich celebrity types, gave everything they owned away to the poor, I would take them seriously.

But to be fair, she worked hard to provide colleges with remedial classes so that students coming from underachieving schools would be able to catch up and then acquire a college education. She also devoted much of her time to camps for disabled and terminally ill children.

She was devoted to her family. Her daughters were her priority. Obviously she was a good wife to have a husband who was devoted to her for thirty-six years and who writes of her in 2006 as if it were still 1965.

I think books like this serve as a catharsis for the writer. It enables them to organize their thoughts about someone very important to them and also provides a way to relive the beautiful moments.