Word: elesina
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Dates: during 1977-1977
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...Elesina Dart is the dark lady. Well-born, though only moderately wealthy, Elesina is a twice-divorced, hard-drinking rebellious actress in her early '30s when she meets social climber Ivy Trask. Ivy is a homely fashion editor whose shrewdness and harshness eventually garner her more than grace and beauty alone would have. Elesina becomes Ivy's protegee, or more accurately, her obsession, and together they fabricate the credentials necessary to enter the upper echelons of New York society. Ivy becomes an unwanted but tolerated member of the select world but Elesina, after her dramatic and scandalous entrance, becomes first...
...cleverly maneuvers Elesina into the "salon," where poets recite new odes over cocktails and scholars extemporise treatises on Shakespeare at the dinner table. Irving Stein, who heads this circle, is a Jewish multimillionaire banker who heads this circle. His ideal in life is to create a "temple of beauty" at Broadlawns, his weekend estate. Clara, his unloved but valuable because Protestant wife, is "the centerpiece of his collection, the beautiful woman to whom the beautiful porcelains, the ivories and jades, the medieval tapestries and stained glass paid silent tribute," the "priestess for the shrine" in the suburbs...
Characters like Ivy are the salvation of many authors. Ivy epitomizes the calculating bitch without becoming a caricature. None of her actions strain credibility, and this is an asset for a plot that gets as cluttered as this one does. Ivy realizes her thwarted spinster dreams through Elesina. Anticipating or rather shaping the impact Elesina has on the Stein men, Ivy patiently builds the foundation for the power she knows Elesina eventually will wield. Disregarding the sacrifices the Steins and eventually she herself make for Elesina. Ivy engineers a divorce, schedules rendezvous for adulterers, sheds the appropriate number of tears...
THIS CHANGE in Elesina, culminating in the final third of the book, is sketchy and weakens the whole story. Some of the characters, including Ivy and Irving, are vividly etched. Others, despite the colorful capsule case histories Auchincloss graciously offers, are not quite comprehensible. Unfortunately, Elesina is one of the incomplete characters. The rich, spoiled beauty is quite frankly not believable in her role as a Republican Carthyism, (which Auchincloss treats frothily as a minor disturbance...