Word: auchincloss
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There are no such heroes in the fiction of Louis Auchincloss, and his romantics almost always pay for succumbing to egoism and stepping out of line Auchincloss's novels and story collections (nearly one a year for 20 years) deal almost exclusively with New York City's white Anglo-Saxon Protestant haven of old name and old money, whose corridor of power runs from the brownstones and duplexes of the Upper East Side to the paneled offices of Wall Street. It is an influential, publicity-shy world where the rules of the game are hardened by tradition...
...Auchincloss ("My father is Jacqueline Kennedy's stepfather's first cousin") is to the novel-of-manners born. Credentials include Groton, Yale, U S Navy and Wall Street, where the 59-year-old author is an estates and trusts lawyer. What better perch from which to observe human nature. Matters can be hidden from a psychoanalyst that can never be hidden from the man who draws up one's will. Perhaps because they usually survive to become the inheritors, women have been especially strong characters in Auchincloss's fiction. "After the age of about...
This view may be dating rapidly, yet it serves to underpin Auchincloss's latest novel. The Dark Lady. It is a Social Register version of A Star Is Born-a tale of two women allied in a successful assault on wealth, fame and political power. The star is Elesina Dart, a beauty of good background who has gone through two marriages and flubbed one promising theatrical career. The impresario is Ivy Trask, a cynical, shrewd middle-aged fashion editor and social arbiter at Broadlawns, the Westchester estate of Judge Irving Stein, banker and art collector...
Born Actress. But Ivy should have read Auchincloss on the natural superiority of women over 40. Elesina grows into the job as mistress of Broadlawns and proves more formidable than her Svengali. As a born actress, she instinctively understands that the world is more than a stage- it is an audience. Her repertoire enlarges. She tutors herself in art history and is both dutiful wife to the aging, impotent Irving and ardent lover of his son David. Elesina knows how to balance passion and Pragmatism: What was all of Broadlawns and its treasure compared to a lover like that...
...usual, Auchincloss steers confidently through the world he knows so well. He telescopes time with delight fully gossipy character sketches and crisp vignettes. His prose is clear and judiciously cool, though his attempts to pump drama into drawing-room confrontations may lead to such awkwardness as "But Ivy's words were still written like the smoke letters of an airplane announcing a public event across the pale sky of Clara's calm...