Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #158277 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-16
• Released on: 2005-04-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In his most personal book, Trillin ( American Stories ) poignantly investigates the life of his Yale classmate and onetime close friend Roger "Denny" Hansen, a Rhodes scholar, academic and State Department employee whose extraordinary promise ended in middle age with his suicide. In brief, almost pointillistic chapters, Trillin isolates the darkness in Hansen's soul. At the same time he dissects his own expectations and those of his peers, examining the influence of an elite university in the sunny 1950s. At what Trillin calls a Big Chill session, Yale classmates recall Denny's hidden insecurity and dependence on accolades, while an adult friend remembers how Hansen's high standards for himself made him a recluse. Trillin learns for the first time that Hansen was gay, which leads him to reflections on his generation's homophobia. He reconstructs how Life magazine chose to profile Hansen at their graduation in 1957, muses on the burdens of a Rhodes scholarship and explores the moralistic Hansen's ineffectiveness as a Washington bureaucrat. "Part of what kept the issues simple is that we didn't spend a lot of time examining them," writes Trillin of the 1950s; here, in deceptively casual style, he redeems that indifference. BOMC selection.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In 1957 Denny Hansen had it all--a "dazzling" smile, a new Yale degree, an appointment as a Rhodes scholar, friends who regarded him practically as an icon, and a boundless future in an era when the sky seemed the limit for bright graduates. In 1991 he became a modern Richard Cory, taking his own life. Trillin, his Yale classmate, tries to determine what went so terribly wrong. However, in his search, we necessarily see so much more of the troubled later years than of the golden years that we ultimately lose sight of the magnitude of the change in Hansen. Expect demand where Trillin's works are popular; also, the public is always morbidly interested in fallen stars. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/92.
- Jim Burns, Ottumwa, Ia.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
In a memoir on an uncharacteristically somber subject, Trillin (American Stories, 1991, etc.) traces the life of his college friend Roger ``Denny'' Hansen: Phi Beta Kappa, Rhodes Scholar, possessor of charm and good looks to spare--and, at age 55, a suicide victim. Denny had seemed such a golden boy that he was photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt for a Life feature on his 1957 graduation from Yale, and his classmates joked about serving in his cabinet when he became President. But life didn't work out that way. Drained of his confidence at Oxford, unable to enter the Foreign Service as he had desired, Denny (now known as ``Roger'' to new acquaintances) fell into a succession of jobs as an itinerant foreign-policy specialist before becoming a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins's School of Advanced International Studies. In his last years, old friends were puzzled by his broken dinner engagements and unreturned phone calls; new associates found him an unsmiling, moralistic nag who never quite fit in. Why did Denny finally kill himself? Because of unbearable back pain (as implied by a suicide note), a dead-end academic specialty, lack of family or loved ones, long-repressed homosexuality--or, as one friend noted, simply because he was ``depressed all of his life''? After searching for the point of no return in his old friend's life, Trillin wisely settles for no easy conclusions (``Roger would have said that you didn't know him at all,'' one lover of Denny's remarks--with which Trillin ruefully agrees). What makes this gloomy post-mortem bearable and even fascinating is a smattering of Trillin's one- liners, as well as shrewd observations on sexual orientation, changes in universities' demographics, and American attitudes toward success. Perhaps more appropriate as one of Trillin's shorter New Yorker pieces--but, still, a fine meditation on one life's aborted promise, the crippling burden of anticipated success, and the mysteries of the human heart. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

A Cheeveresque rumination on unfulfilled potential
Calvin Trillin's "Remembering Denny" is a Cheeveresque rumination on the unfulfilled potential of Trillin's Yale classmate, Denny Hansen. While at Yale, Hansen was so highly thought of that he was profiled in LIFE magazine and his classmates used to kid each other about which cabinet position they'd fill once Hansen had been elected President. After Yale, however, Hansen failed to live up to the high expectations everyone--friends, family, teachers, coaches--had for him. Trillin's book is a delicate examination of what that meant, both for Denny and for his constellation of friends and well-wishers.

Denny doesn't come alive as vividly as might be hoped here, but Trillin does an outstanding job of sketching this young man's life in terms of a larger picture about America. In a country where success on every level is much prized, Trillin subtly but thoroughly plumbs the reasons why Denny didn't succeed--at least not to the extent everyone thought he would. This uncharacteristically somber book is absorbing and thought-provoking, even if it doesn't quite reach the goals Trillin seems to have set for himself in the beginning chapters.

rumination on lost hopes
THis is a very good story of the American dream gone wrong, of an Ivy leaguer who failed to live up to his own expectations and promise and who had many secrets. Take it or leave it, depending on your taste, but I loved it.

From my own school experience, I knew lots of kids like this: they assume the world is waiting for them and make some grim discoveries about how hard it is to make it out there. For Denny, because the story at school occured largely before the questioning of the sixties, the descent to mediocrity was much much harder. (The historical asides on Yale in the 1950s are a fascinating subtheme of the book, as is the building of a career.) Many people will experience a kind of Schadenfreude at his story - handsome wonder boy losing - but it was tragic to me.

Trillin is a wonderful writer, perceptive and sensitive, funny, ironic. He deserves his place in American letters.

Warmly recommended.

"Big Chill" at Yale
The book is a whatdunit: what caused an Ivy League golden boy with a million dollar smile to commit suicide at age 55.

The boy was Denny Hansen. His family was lower middle class and lived in the San Francisco Bay area. At a public high school, he became all-everything. He attended Yale from 1953-57 where he became good friends with the author, Bud Trillin. There, he was a fifties hero: scholar-athlete, a student leader. and all-around good guy. He was a member of swim team, Deke fraternity and the Elizabethan Society. During his senior year, he was tapped by Scroll and Key. He graduated magna cum laude and was admitted to Phi Betta Kappa. Life Magazine published a photo essay about his graduation. He was selected as a Rhodes Scholar and studied two years at Magdalen College at Oxford. He received a master¹s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, Not bad for a young man with his background.

Denny Hansen became Roger D. Hansen. On the career level, he worked briefly in broadcasting, the State Department and at the National Security Council in the Carter administration. He wrote several books on foreign policy that were widely praised. But the Foreign Service rejected his application. Eventually, he was appointed to a chair at the Johns-Hopkins¹ School for Advanced International Studies in Washington. He was a member of the Cosmos Club and the Council on Foreign Relations. On a personal level, Roger never married. He became estranged from his family, his relationships with a few women soured, he gradually alienated his friends from Yale. He became a chronic complainer. He became very depressed. But he always defended right conduct. Near the end of his life, he lived a clandestine gay lifestyle. He bequeathed his pension to his former girl friend, and the remainder of his "huge" estate to Yale.

What caused Roger to commit suicide in 1991?. His friends and colleagues offer various explanations. During conversations after Roger¹s death, his Yale friends discovered that they did not know Roger and may have never really known Denny. Trillin¹s explanation is that because of ³poisonous template of the fifties², Roger could not accept his sexual orientation. A reader can interpret his explanation as an attack on values of the Fifties. To me, the most persuasive explanation is an application of the backpack analogy. When a boy is born, he is wearing a backpack. Other people put their heroic expectations for him in the backpack. The more the boy succeeds, the more expectations are put in the backpack and the heavier it gets. Eventually, the loan becomes unbearable and the boy reaches a crisis. In Roger¹s case, instead of emptying the backpack, he chose to kill himself. He had a house, but not a home. Remember, the line from a Robert Frost poem, "Death of the Hired Man"., ³Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in.² Neither Denny nor Roger had a place where they had to take him in.

The details of the book are fascinating. Trillin describes college life at Yale during the 1950s and the careers of many of Denny¹s classmates and friends.. Of course, Trillin¹s writing is excellent: clear, powerful and sometimes humorous. In a way, the book is a mid-20th Century sequel to Owen Johnson¹s Stover at Yale.

Trillin suggests that the ³poisonous template of the fifties² was the major cause of Roger¹s death in 1991. But change is not equivalent to progress. Sex does not explain everything. Each reader must decide for himself whether, based on the circumstantial evidence, the template of the Fifties enabled Roger to carry his backpack of expectations for more than 30 years, or whether it was the templates of later decades that poisoned the golden boy from California with the million dollar smile.