Word: auchinclosses
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...time Louis Auchincloss came along to write such Jamesian, Whartonian novels of manners as The Rector of Justin and The Great World and Timothy Colt, the Society of Mrs. Astor's ballroom no longer meant much, except to itself. The European aristocracy that it had tried to emulate was moribund and more impoverished than ever, and in the U.S. there were simply too many circles of the rich and self-pleased -- in the oil and entertainment industries, in politics, in the media business, among wealthy alumni of Midwestern cow colleges, lately in the computer industry -- for any one social elite...
...Auchincloss wrote about social decay, about the gradual bleeding of moral force and money from the old Protestant families of Manhattan. His Collected Stories (Houghton Mifflin; 465 pages; $24.95) were written from 1949 to the . present, and their themes are remarkably consistent. Again and again, Auchincloss describes pale people who turn their faces, shuddering, from the modern world. His male protagonists are weak and bloodless, his women lumpy and conflicted. As a class, they have even lost their ability to breed. "A virgin to both sexes" is a confessional phrase used more than once, wryly but without regret...
...both more conservative and more ambitious. Black Jack was an exuberant but careless investor; the Wall Street crash of 1929 finished his market ride. His marriage began to falter then, and it ended when Jackie was nine. Janet then married into one of the richer branches of the vast Auchincloss clan...
...possible that Jackie's quest for money -- probably the reason behind her unhappy marriage to Onassis -- is rooted in her father's financial troubles. But her stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss, was generous; she headed off to Miss Porter's School, an ultra-posh boarding school, with her own horse. Two years at Vassar followed, but Jackie was too restless to thrive in the leafy confines of a Poughkeepsie, New York, campus. She finished college at George Washington University and, spurning the Prix de Paris offers, began her job as the Inquiring Photographer for the Washington Times-Herald...
...executive experiences moral vertigo in his ordered world; a wife holds her husband up to public ridicule, only to have things turn around as soon as they are alone in the bedroom. Once people like these were the focus of Henry James and Edith Wharton; in recent years Louis Auchincloss and John Cheever have been their chroniclers. Robinson shows a similar mastery of subject and form, and she belongs in that august company...