The author views his family through the prism of a sitcom. The people who consider life sweet, and air this belief in public, tend to sit home on Saturday night.
Good fortune is dull company.
Calvin Trillin comprehends the exuberance of exasperation precisely. Collections of his columns and essays like ''American Fried'' and ''If You Can't Say Something Nice'' elegantly demonstrate the art of blustering as he inveighs against five-star restaurants listed in the Mobil Travel Guide, or disparages the use of ''whom,'' or decries the failure of airline flight attendants to carry change. The ''of course'' sets up a kind of winking rapport between us and Trillin as we watch him prove, with increasing bombast, that he's right. The joke is always him, Calvin Trillin, curmudgeonly plebeian, whose goal is to expose the absurdity of everyday existence while reaffirming that an everyday existence is worth having because there is so much to it. Though he styles himself a master of complaint, he's truly the master of appreciation, in whose hands a hamburger can become a divine object.