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...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...
...kind of poor man's cocaine, isobutyl nitrite is known to users as a "popper" because its effects are similar to those of its restricted chemical cousin, amyl nitrite. Poppers have become the newest cheap kick for increasing numbers of people: manufacturers estimate that 5 million Americans regularly inhale the chemical, both on the dance floor and later in bed. Some people use it as a quick upper during the day. "I carry a bottle of it with me all the time," says Ron Braun, 28, a California carpenter. "If I'm bored and want a rush...