Word: auchincloss
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OKAY, YOU CAN READ a second-rate five-line limerick like this to find out about Wall St. law practice, or you can read a second-rate 254-page novel by Louis Auchincloss and be taken for the total, unabridged, ride. But you end up in much the same place. On the last page in Auchincloss's novel, the latest in a seemingly inexhaustible stream of books about New York society, the final sentence reads "He was going to have as much fun with his crazy new law firm as Annabel [his wife] had even had in bed with...
...anyone who goes looking for steamy good stuff in an Auchincloss novel is bound for disappointment, no matter how promising the end sounds at first. Auchincloss tries to write novels of manners about upper-class New York: its institutions, its society, its members and its professional customs. The Partners deals particularly with professional customs, the affairs of a big downtown New York law firm, the type of organization historically known as Wall Street law factory, but which is today as often located in mid-town Manhattan as on Wall Street. It is the kind of place to which Harvard College...
...Partners, Auchincloss...
...Partners, Louis Auchincloss could not be plainer about how he operates within his chosen limits. His 20th work of fiction, the book is not truly a novel but a set of stories loosely linked by principal characters who happen to be members of the same Wall Street law firm. Each incidental anecdote and character sketch is arranged to show how time and change have affected the values and manners of Auchincloss's narrowing circle...
Despite his rather reserved, fiduciary tone, Auchincloss generates some psychological subtlety and emotional range. He also manages to comment on his own situation as a novelist of manners-through a character who is a novelist of manners. "Society is intent on becoming classless, and the novel of manners must deal with classes," says the N.O.M., who allows that his following can be found among the "old girls and boys who still take me to the hospital for their hysterectomies and prostates...