Word: auchincloss
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...should come as no surprise, then, if the characters in Louis Auchincloss's new novel The Dark Lady have an instant appeal for many readers. His protagonists would fit right into the Palm Court, and they are the ogled, not the oglers. They move in a world of wealth, status and power, and even their tragedies are tinged with high society glamor. And tragedies abound in this occasionally melodramatic, disjoined story, which opens during the Depression, develops which opens during the Depression, develops through World War II, skips over the Armistice years and picks up again early in the McCarthy...
THIS CHANGE in Elesina, culminating in the final third of the book, is sketchy and weakens the whole story. Some of the characters, including Ivy and Irving, are vividly etched. Others, despite the colorful capsule case histories Auchincloss graciously offers, are not quite comprehensible. Unfortunately, Elesina is one of the incomplete characters. The rich, spoiled beauty is quite frankly not believable in her role as a Republican Carthyism, (which Auchincloss treats frothily as a minor disturbance...
...Sicilian immigrant named Luigi--call him Lou--wanted his son to grow up to be a cultured gentleman, to smoke cigars and read good books. Lou knew a lot about Harvard, he had seen the picture of the bell tower on the glossy catalogue cover, had read every Louis Auchincloss novel, so he was sure it was a classy place. And he was shelling out 7000 bills a year so his son could absorb a little of that class. Carlo knew all that, and figured at least the housing office could have given him a roommate who had gone...
...fact the author himself, thinly veiled. The contractual sense of mission dominates the book as it does Auchin-closs's life. Related both by marriage and blood to the Winthrop family, trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, leader in the Century Club and the Downtown Association, Auchincloss prides himself on being an arbiter elegantiarum. So it is with authority that he writes about his Winthrop kinsmen, worthy judges of men and manners of their own times...
...Puritan ethic. Through all his talk of covenants, missions and Puritan ideals runs an annoying smugness. Novelists John Marquand and John O'Hara also assayed the WASP upper crust in their writings, but rarely presumed to give their characters a moral or aesthetic superiority over the Great Unwashed. Auchincloss, on the other hand, hints that his Winthrops are not only different from you and me, they are better. By birth and from birth they remain arbiters of elegance...