Remembering Denny.

• Author: Fallows, James

Calvin Trillin's latest book has received the sort of consistently favorable press that often makes me suspect that log-rolling is underway in New York. After reading Remembering Denny, I'm convinced that the praise is genuine and well deserved. To my taste this is the best of Trillin's many books. It takes only two or three hours to read but raises questions worth mulling for a long time.

The one way in which the book fails is in giving a clear answer to the question with which it begins: Why, exactly, did the person Trillin had known in the fifties as a golden boy at Yale kill himself in 1991? Trillin had known this friend as "Denny" Hansen, a sunny-seeming, handsome varsity athlete and natural scholar who charmed everyone he met. Those who encountered the same man in Washington, in the decade before his death, knew him as Roger D. Hansen, a sour-seeming, run-of-the-mill figure at a think tank.

Trillin ends up confessing that he can't really explain how the first man turned into the second. Instead, he ticks off all the factors that might have played a part. Perhaps Hansen was at war with the realization that he was homosexual, which did not fit his own idea of fifties-style perfection. In middle age, Hansen suffered constant pain from back and shoulder injuries; perhaps this was just too depressing for someone who had starred on Yale's swim team. Hansen's family had a history of mental illness; perhaps, as another friend said at his funeral, he had been "depressed all of his life," even when seeming to be on top of the world. Perhaps it was simple bad luck and bad timing at several of his jobs. (For instance, he emerged as an academic specialist in "North-South" issues at just the time when Americans were getting bored with the Third World.) Perhaps there was no one decisive reason but just a number of things all gone wrong.

Trillin's inability to solve this mystery (as if anyone could) does not matter, because the book's payoff comes through the observations and portrayals along the way. Trillin has always seemed reluctant to draw big-picture conclusions in his writing, but his reporting is so careful and his descriptions so vivid and funny that the reader has plenty to work with when drawing conclusions of his own. In this book, the richest material concerns three main subjects.

One is the huge generational shift in perceptions of homosexuality. As an adult in New York, Trillin and his wife lived on one side of the generational divide...