Word: auchinclosses
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...EMBEZZLER by Louis Auchincloss. 277 pages. Houghfon Mifflin...
Among authors who have written about the rich, from Thackeray to Fitzgerald, envy in the form of satire has often leaked onto the page. But Louis Auchincloss has no reason to envy the rich. He is a member of the club, an urbane, 48-year-old member of his elected fictional milieu-old families, old money and old schools. As do his other books, this tenth novel presents a balanced, unjudgmental insider's view of the world he knows. The Embezzler, in fact, is unjudgmental almost to a fault...
...Author Auchincloss traverses this somewhat lurid ground with his customary cool style. A writer annealed by the disciplines of the law, which he still practices in Manhattan, he is incapable of setting an uncertain, unseemly or ungraceful foot. His narrative, his paragraphs and his sentences flow with smooth inevitability...
...lawyer in Auchincloss forbears to pass judgment. Instead, he lets Guy Prime, Rex Geer and Angelica do it, in each of the book's three parts. Their testimony conflicts so widely, just as testimony does in courts, that the reader may end up wishing that the author had donned magistrate's robes and handed down a verdict...
Things weren't so merry around Merrywood three years ago when Washington Stockbroker Hugh D. Auchincloss sold the 46-acre estate on the Potomac Palisades to a syndicate that wanted to build three 17-story apartment buildings there. Desecration! fumed Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, arguing that the hills that "Hughdee's" stepdaughter, Jackie Kennedy, had loved as a child were also one of the nation's "great scenic resources." A resourceful Interior Department headed off the deal, and now Washington Investor C. Wyatt Dickerson, who recently bought the place for $650,000, plans to turn Merrywood into...