Rating: 
Summary: The Fundamentals of Play
Review: Caitlin Macy does an amazing job of portraying the generation of us born in the sixties. We are too young to really be baby-boomers and a little too old to be Generation X'ers. Macy captures our coming of age in the 1980's in a phenomenal way. Growing up in New England, I actually new these characters. Every prep school, country club and seaside resort had a Kate Goodenow and Nick Beale. Cara McLean, whose character is most symbolic of the 1980's and its excess, is someone we all new. George Lenhart is an excellent narrator. His candor and observations portray an accurate picture of the complex relationships of priviledged twenty-somthings in the 1980's. Oddly enough,aside from George, the most redeeming character in the book is Harry Lombardi. After years of studying Wharton,James and Fitzgerald, it was quite an experience to read a novel that defines one's own generation and the changing society we faced a decade ago. I applaud Caitlin Macy's talent and eagerly anticipate her next work.
Rating: 
Summary: Equivocal Re-working of "Gatsby"
Review: I'm still trying to make up my mind about this book, but it fascinated me to the point that I'll certainly read it again. The book covers the post -college years of the set depicted in Whit Stillman's movie "Metropolitan," and like that movie it seems to be a deliberate anachronism. My impression is that it consciously attempts to depict a world that doesn't really exist any more--or, in Stillman's words, "not so very long ago." (But what do I really know? I'm from the Left Coast and went to public schools.) The book examines the apparently fascinating Kate and four men who care about her, each in their own way. I say "apparently" because it seems that Ms. Macy intends to make Kate's attraction difficult for outsiders to understand. Her allure is inexplicable to those who--unlike the narrator and his three potential rivals--are not captivated by her. "The Great Gatsby" is the overarching influence here: the rich girl, the upstart, the poor man from a good family, the effete snob--all these could come straight from Gatsby, but to Ms. Macy's credit, she largely succeeds in making these characters her own. As is mentioned by an earlier reviewer, there are some jarring aspects to the book that one thinks a better editor would have weeded out, particularly the dim social view of Catholicism. The narrator is vicious not only in his description of the the working-class lobsterman's daughter, but even the aspiring middle class Harry, and I think this weakens the book. Still, the scene in which Harry "confesses" to George that he was admitted to Dartmouth on brains alone relies on this implicit bias, and is perhaps the more telling because of it. If you liked "Brideshead Revisited," "Metropolitan," "The Secret History," and, of course, "Gatsby," I think you will be intrigued by this book. Finally, if you buy "Fundamentals," be sure to pick up some limes, tonic, and Mount Gay rum. The book's vivid depiction of cocktail parties is sure to leave you craving a drink.
Rating: 
Summary: stick with the original
Review: This book attempted an ambitious feat - to transport "The Great Gatsby" to the present day, but the author's reach was higher than her grasp. The characters behaved more like thirtysomethings - and yes, I do know people of the same class in real life, and they definitely do not behave like these characters. Anyway, the characters were for the most part, tissue thin, dull, and/or unlikeable, especially the woman for whom we were supposed to believe most of the males had been carrying a torch for since prep school. Yet, other reviewers have raved over this book, and its "fine writing" so maybe it's worth a shot.
Rating:
Summary: Macy's Book Echos Stillman
Review: Okay...I'm not a product of east coast prep schools, country clubs, or sailing. However, I knew some of these types, in college and high school (midwest prep school). Perhaps, like Harry Lombardi, I find myself fascinated by a group that I've never been a part of. While I never had the desire to break into the group, I'm fascinated, like George, by their innerworkings. I make it a practice to read as many first novels as possible. I find their strength and beauty to be wonderful. The Fundamentals of Play is a triumph. Is the finest book I've ever read??...No, but is engrossing. The characters are well drawn...Chat? Chat Whethers is grand. The situations are great. This novel, set in the just pre-internet world of 1993/94 (or so I've guessed) tells the story of a fading way of life. Not only does Macy comment, through George (she writes men well) on the oddities of Whit Stillman's Metropolitan Kids (the recent touchstone of this set)...but puts her own spin on it. I won't even compare this to Gatsby...why? Macy tells her own story. Most of all, it captures the spirit of young people, fighting against the march of time, clinging to the past and its idols. It is about a univeral desire for acceptance and finding a place in the world. Kate...well her attraction is almost mystical...we all knew a Kate. While the sitatuions might be a million miles away to you, the feelings are something that reside in your heart. Cheers, Ms. Macy!
Rating:
Summary: stick with the original
Review: This book attempted an ambitious feat - to transport "The Great Gatsby" to the present day, but the author's reach was higher than her grasp. The characters behaved more like thirtysomethings - and yes, I do know people of the same class in real life, and they definitely do not behave like these characters. Anyway, the characters were for the most part, tissue thin, dull, and/or unlikeable, especially the woman for whom we were supposed to believe most of the males had been carrying a torch for since prep school. Yet, other reviewers have raved over this book, and its "fine writing" so maybe it's worth a shot.
Rating:
Summary: jaunty? please.
Review: I've read Gatsby. In fact, I've read everything of Fitzgerald's, the letters the short stories. I don't think Ms. Macy necessary has, but she has read Gatsby. Reading this book reminds me of those Star Wars ripoffs that spread out like a virtual diaspora after the initial trilogy was completed, where there seemed a desparate need to continue the legacy of a great story that alas, had come to an end. They were all plagued with these italicized voiceovers, which paraphrased lines from the movies. "The Force is strong within my family. I have it, my father has it. My sister has it." And so on. Macy, sadly, despite her Yale/Columbia lineage seems content to do the same with TFOP. Her use of the word jaunty, along with the word chin, recur with the sad frequency of someone who read the description of Jordan Baker a time too many. And the plot is practically ganked straight from Gatsby. The descriptions of how lousy it is to be poor, educated and a manhattanite are straight out of the soliloquy that Nick delivers as he is contemplating Broadway at dusk. Even worse, the dialogue that comes out of these characters is sad, uninspired, and even if accurate, virtually unreadable. If you want to read a book that does gatsby justice, I suggest picking up The Catcher in the Rye, instead.
Rating:
Summary: Another appointment in Samarra
Review: Two-thirds of the way through Caitlin Macy's elegant, playfully dark comedy, "The Fundamentals of Play," her narrator, George Lenhart, Dartmouth graduate from an old WASP family that's fallen on hard financial times and now a financial analyst on Wall Street, sums up his generation, and the book's theme. Twenty-something in the early 1980s, George is narrating the book from the perspective of the turn of the century but he is writing about events during the summer New York's least-loved skyscraper, the Pan Am Building, was sold and became the Met Life building. George observes: "we were the last generation of the century to come of age, and the first one that wanted to be as much like our parents' as possible. We ought to have started a revolution; instead we bought cocktail shakers." 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.
Rating:
Summary: Another appointment in Samarra
Review: Two-thirds of the way through Caitlin Macy's elegant, playfully dark comedy, "The Fundamentals of Play," her narrator, George Lenhart, Dartmouth graduate from an old WASP family that's fallen on hard financial times and now a financial analyst on Wall Street, sums up his generation, and the book's theme. Twenty-something in the early 1980s, George is narrating the book from the perspective of the turn of the century but he is writing about events during the summer New York's least-loved skyscraper, the Pan Am Building, was sold and became the Met Life building. George observes: "we were the last generation of the century to come of age, and the first one that wanted to be as much like our parents' as possible. We ought to have started a revolution; instead we bought cocktail shakers." 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.
Rating: 
Summary: A sad waste of a gifted writers talents & the reader's time.
Review: Caitlin Macy is a very talented lady-she'd have to be to keep me hopeful enough to finish this book. She has an elegant and engaging prose style, shows flashes innovative dialog and a good sense of pacing. All of that is on display here-yet this is an awful book. The story-such as it is-surrounds the various desires-often bordering on obsession-of three old college acquaintances with one Kate Goodenow. For this concept to work Kate obviously has to have some element of extraordinary attractiveness and/or allure that's evident to one and all-hopefully including the reader, this being a novel-to justify and provide context to the strength of these men's obsessive behavior. The problem is Kate comes across as little more than a boring social snob of very little intelligence, less appeal and virtually no visible character. As one reads this abomination the primary reaction one has is to repress the need to scream "Grow up you twits!!!" about every 5 pages or so. All of the characters apparently have-and hold-their respective important jobs solely through their elevated social status-no one ever seems to do a jot of work. Yet, they all seem to feel oppressed and put upon in their professional lives. At least they are projected as having professional lives, which is much more than can be said of their personal lives, which appear to consist of little more than an interminable and inexplicable process of impetuously satisfying whatever morbid, stupid or ridiculous notion crosses their mind at any given moment. It's a testament to Macy's writing ability that I stayed the course to see if any sign of sense or maturity would appear on the scene-it didn't. All in all, as sad a waste of Macy's talent in writing this as I experienced in reading it. Groucho Marx once observed "This is not a book to be put aside lightly-it should be thrown with great force!" This would be a good candidate for such advice. One can only hope Macy will develop the ability to provide characters and stories equal to her talent in the future.
Rating:
Summary: Dead On
Review: Reading some of the reviews below, you'd think the book is principally about money and that the story is, essentially, nothing more than another retelling of the constant battle between old money vs. new, class vs. classlessness, privilege vs. ambition. Clearly, there are elements of this old story in this book, but I don't think that gets to the heart of what the author is meaning to explore. What George, the narrator, envies is not the money itself (which he does not have, but which Chat and Harry do), nor "stature" (which, by their shared pedigree, Chat and George both have, but which Harry does not), but rather the casual disaffectedness--the seemingly bestowed "right" not ever to have to know, or care, from where the privilege came nor whether it is being used properly or squandered--that can only exist in someone who has always had both wealth and stature. This is what Chat and Kate share and it is what draws both George and Harry to them. The book is remarkably well written and captures the set and setting--both at prep school and in New York--very well. Indeed it is the set and setting more than the underlying story which held my attention, and I found myself recognizing time and time again the world of my classmates and friends. I would not recommend this book to everyone. If you are not interested in the world and the mind of the New England "elite," you will likely not enjoy this book. But if you "got" the Great Gatsby, you will probably get this, too.
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