Word: auchinclosses
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...rest of the characters wheeled out in Author Auchincloss' filigreed tale of a family fortune are only slightly more alive than Josiah. A lawyer by profession, Auchincloss probes with exasperating precision through the backgrounds and bankbooks of the five-generation descendants of one Julius Millinder. a tough-minded merchant who just happened to put together a $100 million fortune after the Civil War. Nothing the author finds suggests that the Millinder clan is worth the trouble. After Julius, the stock began to go to seed. One granddaughter marries a French prince-but not for love. A grandson is cuckolded...
Having kneaded the same sort of upper crust in four books before this one. Author Auchincloss seems unaware that his people are increasingly dull anachronisms. Hi; careful, courtly prose almost manages to confer dignity, but in the end his novel is like the great Newport mansions it recalls -elaborately ornamented in its facade too dry and dusty inside for a modern generation to bother about...
...HOUSE OF FIVE TALENTS (369 pp.) -Louis Auchincloss-Houghton Mifflin...
...cornered hat marked "El Senatore," striking a stiff Napoleonic stance in the stern of a small dory with other members of his family crowded behind him. ("I've got to get nine Kennedys in that boat with him.") For the big night, Jackie's stepfather, Hugh D. Auchincloss, her mother, half brother and half sister drove to Hyannisport from Newport, watched doggedly through the nominating speeches, floor demonstrations and roll call while Jackie painted. Jack called just before the balloting and just after, but in the quiet mood of Hyannisport Jackie didn't grasp that...
...Novelist Auchincloss, who has written this sort of book before (The Great World and Timothy Colt, Venus in Sparta), knows his forms and his upper-crust Long Islanders. His description of Esther and the other Parmelee Cove women pursuing the adulterers like a chorus of Eumenides has the rasp of accurate reporting. But if Reese's predicament is real, he himself is sometimes the sort of hero scissored by children from the backs of cereal boxes. His incessant wrestling with the devil is a little sophomoric, and his escape from Parmelee Cove shows the limits of even the best...