Word: cousin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Jacobson, a shaggy and hot-tempered man of 48, had once been one of the country's leading horse trainers. His cousin, Patrice Jacobs, is the wife of Financier Louis Wolfson and co-owner of Triple Crown Winner Affirmed. Jacobson got into a variety of troubles, however, and in 1970 New York's State Racing Commission suspended him for five years for fraud, misrepresentation, and mishandling of funds. Jacobson remained an entrepreneur of sorts, though, and he owned the seven-story building where Tupper lived. He rented out apartments to models and stewardesses, keeping a penthouse with swimming...
...COUNTRY COUSIN by Louis Auchincloss Houghton Mifflin; 239pages...
...typical Louis Auchincloss novel varies as the weather varies from year to year; some are stormier than others, some a degree or two more torrid, but there are few surprises. The Country Cousin, this year's offering, features a cast familiar to readers of his 20 previous works of fiction: the calculating but sympathetic adventuress from a deprived background; an older sponsor scornful of the conventions of New York Society; taciturn, philandering businessmen with ruddy faces; and their thwarted wives, thirsting for uninhibited affairs. No more unpleasant crowd has been assembled since the days of the robber barons...
...beginning, The Country Cousin more or less follows the plot of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Like Wharton's orphaned Lily Bart, taken up by affluent friends and coached on how to navigate the perilous shoals of custom and snobbery in fashionable New York City circa 1900, Auchincloss's Amy Hunt moves in with her elderly cousin, Dolly Chadbourne, following the death of her parents. But Lily resists the eligible lawyer who importunes her, and commits suicide rather than compromise her reputation. Several decades and revolutions later, the more liberated Amy runs off with...
...Country Cousin is not among his better novels; in The Embezzler Auchincloss provides a vivid account of how fortunes are made and lost on Wall Street, and his one masterpiece, The Rector of Justin, illuminates a gallery of worldly, dominating men whose characters might have been formed on the playing fields of Groton. But in The Country Cousin, the obligatory references to that world-St.Paul's and Yale; a Whistler in the drawing room; decrepit aunts given to decrying socialism, Jews and Roosevelt-simply fail to summon a social realm that James and Wharton made live...