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Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor
By Tad Friend, Little, Brown, 353 pages, $24.99. Friend presents a reading at R.J. Julia Booksellers, 7 p.m., Wed., Oct. 7, 768 Boston Post Road, Madison; 203-245-3959, rjjulia.com, free.

I’ve met my share of Wasps. Not the plummy New England kind but the breed found below the Mason-Dixon, some of whose lineage goes all the way back to guys like John C. Calhoun, America’s seventh Vice President and South Carolina’s foremost advocate for enslaving black people.

As a cultural journalist, I encountered them in their roles as board members of the art museums, orchestras and music festivals I covered. They are an elusive breed, in fact usually invisible from public view. But they do come out in furs and diamonds, seersucker and wingtips for opening galas, posh fundraisers and other such things. Less apparent is their grip on power. On occasion, my stories would inspire phone calls to my publisher, who in turn attempted to coerce me without tripping the alarm bells of journalistic ethics. More significant were private conversations when elder Wasps suggested that my reporting might end up jeopardizing my job, or my wife’s.

So in reading Tad Friend’s Cheerful Money, part family memoir and part sociological inquiry, I understand that Wasps are an endangered species of American society. That’s news to me. Yet if Friend is to be believed, I can’t say I’m feeling any pangs of regret or loss. And it seems fair to say that most people, especially those who’ve ever felt excluded, won’t feel a sense of empathy for those who’ve done most of the excluding in U.S. history.

Yet there is a tragic note to Friend’s portrait. Rightly, he makes distinctions between white Protestants and Wasps. Elvis was a Wasp. So was Hank Williams. But Elvis and Hank hardly shared the “cast of mind,” as Friend elegantly puts it: “My family and their friends … were circumscribed less by skin tone and religion than by a set of traditions and expectations.”

That cast of mind takes expression in word usage — whether to say tomayto or tomahto and what that says about you, your family and your “breeding” — as well as in clothing, schools, demeanor and attitude.

Wasps never appear eager, Friend writes, for eagerness suggests striving, which suggests one isn’t already on top. One always appears sunny even when gloominess might be forgiven (Friend recalls his mother labeling a jar “cheerful money” for siblings who demonstrated cheer in the face of adversity; Pier, his successful investment banker brother, always won the most cash). Wasps like to booze. They tolerate boozing. They even encourage boozing, because it’s a rare time when the embarrassment of riches isn’t so embarrassing. Wasps always have cutesy names, like Bootsy and Baba and Wassa and Taddy, baby-talk that evolved into a form of infantalization that evolved into a way to maintain the “natural” order of things.

So relationships boil down to power. And all the deep resentments that come from abuse of power.

History threatened that order. The Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the Vietnam War all took their toll. Eventually the ga-ga 1980s and the rise of a technocratic super-rich hurled the final blow to Wasp splendor, Friend writes.

So long to Jay Gatsby. Hello to Gordon Gekko.

Given the pressure to preserve the status quo, and the pressure to yield to modern times, it’s a wonder any young Wasp grows up sane. Many, like Friend’s drunk and depressed relatives, don’t. Wasps never question the order of things. Instead, they tend to just “drink, sink, and drop away.”

Friend became conscious of that fate and took pains to dodge it. He spent his inheritance on psychotherapy, traveled the world, became a New Yorker correspondent, and married late in life. He lives on money he actually earns himself.

His journey, as depicted in this evocative yet never sentimental memoir, is like the American Dream in reverse. Instead of material gain, Friend strove for emotional solace, a quality that, come to think of it, is all too human. Eventually, he managed to tame that peculiar “cast of mind,” but, like his brethren, much was lost in the bargain.