A brilliantly written and odd book, mostly a memoir and an autobiographic essay by career New Yorker writer Tad friend, but verging at times on crystalline fiction, on sappy self-help relationship book, as furtive apologia by an unreliable narrator who cheats repeatedly on his wife, and finds in his father's life both a justification and a source of blame for this.
Friend's Wasp-y background -- born and raised in New England, his father a distinguished East Asian Studies professor an author and president of Swarthmore, a preppy education and avocations (Tad was a nationally ranked squash player - as was his father) -- this chill and chilly background is at odds with Friend's confessional intention.
If you love a demanding task that requires both discipline and talent...-- you eventually discover an innate boundary: you can apprehend real virtuosity, especially as it's used to best you, but you can never quite incorporate it. You will never be more than almost great...Yet the truly great players sacrifice so much that they stare back at us with equal longing. Or so we console ourselves. [115]
"Oversight" is a Janus word, like "buckle" or "cleave": it means both supervision and neglect [122]
'Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.' - James Salter [128]
'Think well on this, my sweet:
Our bodies need not truly beat
Upon each other,
But, past their funerary heat.
Will slide together perfectly,
Grain and micrograin
Intimate and without stain,
Closer than ever they were in life.' -Day Friend (Tad's father) [155]
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