Trillin sweetly celebrates his wife

About Alice
By Calvin Trillin
Random House, 78 pp., $14.95

So many books about the dead are all about dying.

Fights with doctors, slips into dementia, dysfunctional family members resolving long standing feuds in waiting rooms. In "About Alice," death minds its own business. We know it's there, we expect its eventual arrival, but it isn't going to spoil our visit. From the first page, Calvin Trillin makes it clear why we're here. We are going to spend a few hours with somebody we miss.

Alice Trillin died of cardiac arrest on Sept. 11, 2001. (That's no typo.) Her heart had been weakened by lung cancer. Only 63, Alice's death was felt not just by her family but countless readers who knew her as the entertaining Trillin's straight woman. The author called two of his books "Alice, Let's Eat " and "Travels With Alice. " But her presence dotted decades of work that didn't have her name in the title.

Trillin kept writing after Alice's death, from poems mocking the Bush administration to a novel about parking. Last March, though, he gave us "Alice, Off the Page." Rebecca Traister in Salon called The New Yorker piece "one of the saddest, funniest, loveliest stories you've read in a very long time." It now appears in hardcover as "About Alice."

Not three pages in, Trillin owns up to the sitcom image he created of his wife: Alice, voice of reason, playing the "dietician in sensible shoes." She wasn't. To illustrate, Trillin recounts an event in San Francisco years ago, when a member of the audience, curious to set eyes on this recurring character, asked if the real Alice might stand up.

"As usual, she looked smashing," Trillin writes. "She didn't say anything. She just leaned over and took off one of her shoes -- shoes that looked like they cost about the amount of money required in some places to tide a family of four over for a year or two -- and, smiling, waved it in the air."

What's not to love about Alice? She wasn't some slack-jawed groupie the author picked up at Bread Loaf. She was a peer, a mother, and a professional. She served as more than a muse for her husband, America's quietest great writer. Alice read his work before he mailed it off to an editor.

In "About Alice," we learn that Trillin rewrote "Remembering Denny, " his stunning 1993 book centering on a Yale classmate's suicide, after his wife read a draft and left a memo outlining a better way to get at the story. And Trillin didn't offer his manuscripts simply to make his writing better. He also wanted to impress. In an early collection, the dedication read: "These stories were written for Alice -- to make her giggle."

What makes "About Alice" work is what makes most of Trillin's writing work. He has a soft touch, and a bloodhound's nose for a punch line. So we can admire Alice for her selflessness when counseling a cancer-stricken teenager, while also feasting on the back-and-forth between the couple. Trillin, writing of Alice's beauty, talks of how she "often attracted what I called 'guys smoking pipes.' "

" 'He wasn't smoking a pipe, by the way,' she'd say, knowing just which guy I was talking about when I mentioned 'that guy with the pipe' as we discussed a party on the way home. In fact, I can't remember any of those 'guys smoking pipes,' who actually were smoking pipes."

"Is that right," I'd say. "I could have sworn he was tamping down the tobacco, or whatever they do, when he made that remark about the flaws in Derrida's thinking."

In the end, even Trillin can't keep a mournful pang from slipping into the book. But there are no white-hot revelations about mistaken diagnoses or ruminations on heartbreak. It's more the realization of that soft, slow current that pushes life forward, and the sad discovery of how quickly it is gone.

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.