About Calvin Trillin’s “Alice”

Calvin Trillin’s “About Alice” (Random House, $10.17 at Amazon) is barely a book — 78 pages (starting on page 3), with wide margins and large print — but it definitely belongs between hard covers.  It is, as Rebecca Traister called it in Salon, “one of the saddest, funniest, loveliest stories you’ve read in a very long time.”   

The book is Trillin’s portrait/memoir/eulogy of his wife Alice, who died of cardiac arrest on September 11, 2001, here presented as her own person, not as the stock character (usually “TM” — The Mom) in his books and New Yorker articles.

Here is a brief excerpt, picked virtually at random, about an incident with their contractor Herbie, whom Trillin liked because he gave them a fixed price, not an estimate of what their job would cost:

When our job was in its final stages, Herbie told me that it had turned out to be more difficult than he’d predicted, so he thought we should pay him more than the agreed price.  I didn’t think so.  Alice did. 

I told Alice that Herbie was in the business of judging what a job would cost him and then giving customers a price that was low enough to win the job but high enough to give him a profit.  If he guessed wrong now and then — and I wasn’t even taking it for granted that he was telling the truth about guessing wrong this time — he’d presumably make up for it by guessing right most of the time.  If Herbie had found that putting in our floors required less time than he’d figured on, would he have suggested that we pay him less than the agreed price?

In Alice’s view, the point was that Herbie had, in fact, been required to spend more man hours on the job than he’d estimated — she did assume he was telling the truth — so if we didn’t pay him more we were being unfair, taking advantage of him.  What he would do if the situation were reversed wasn’t relevant to our behavior.

I said the world didn’t work that way.  Her world did.  I can’t recall what we finally paid Herbie, but now that I try to reconstruct the issues, it occurs to me that if we retained some Talmudic scholars to mediate, they would have decided that Alice was right.

In the next paragraph, Trillin takes the Talmudic theme a lovely step further, as he deals with what was always Alice’s final argument in such situations:  “He doesn’t have a very nice life. . . . And we’re so lucky.”  But I’ll leave that for you to read.

There are few books of any length that carry as much love and emotion, with such graceful writing, as this one.

Alice and Calvin Trillin, leaving the London registry office where they were married on Aug. 13, 1965.