Word: ayers
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...Joad and A. J. Ayer...
...ENCLOSURE (280 pp.)-Ethan Ayer -Little, Brown...
Just how "different" the rich are has long been a fascinating problem for U.S. novelists, but few have been able to do much with it. Like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, most U.S. writers have been too middle class. Ethan Ayer, 31, the Brooks School, Trinity College, and (says his dust jacket) of "a well-known riding and hunting family," should presumably be able to write about wealth with the fullness of first-hand knowledge. In The Enclosure, a first novel, he has tried hard, but he has not quite turned the trick...
...exclusive suburb obviously set on Boston's North Shore. A faintly Renaissance gate opening on ten driveways, houses ranging in style from Jacobean to classical revival, a very private beach, old families not merely rich but entirely accustomed to it-this is the special world about which Ethan Ayer writes. His book is a portfolio of vignettes: the well-bred old snobs, the new, vulgar rich, the wealthy young weaklings and, behind all these, the pompous and romantic servants...
Though he is clearly talented, Novelist Ayer has written a book that is long on artiness and short on life, full of mincing chatter and burdened with too complex a structure. His final approach to his people is as simple and inadequate as a cliche: the rich, he feels, stink. This may or may not be true, but his novel never gets close enough to his people to prove it. What was meant as a clever portrait of social decay pretty much ends as a mannered exercise in claustrophobia...