Louis Auchincloss, 1917-2010

Manhattan Monologues
by Louis Auchincloss
Houghton Mifflin, 226 pp., $25

THE NARRATOR of one of the stories in Louis Auchincloss's "Manhattan Monologues" notes that her father's name--Livingston Van Rensselaer Schuyler--sounds "like the take-off of an old New York moniker in a Harvard Hasty Pudding show."

Or in a Louis Auchincloss story, she might have added. The Manhattan lawyer Auchincloss, now eighty-five years old, has described in dozens of novels the world of New York's old money and the lives of those who possess it. These people leave the Upper East Side only to visit a private archipelago of prep schools and yacht clubs. Certain of his characters harp monomaniacally on the subject of family ("It was still important that I was not a Thorn; I was a Seward. Mother, of course, had been a Thorn . . ."), are apt to distinguish between a town's "principal citizens" and its "smaller folk," and slam down the portcullis against any contact with modern tawdriness ("Gary had his first experience with lower-class American adult males, and they did not impress him"). Auchincloss has been viewed as beyond parody and beneath literary criticism. His novels are consigned to the ethnic-fiction hell inhabited by books with titles like "In My Mother's Kitchen in Guatemala"--and to the ninth circle of that hell, for the elitism, crassness, and exclusivity that are his own ethnic group's most harped-on historical failing.

But to dismiss Auchincloss this way is to underestimate an important novelist of the last half century. Auchincloss is not a cheerleader for his class but a patient unraveler of problems that are far from class-specific. Moneyed barbarian jollity in the world of the Social Register is his books' backdrop, not their subject. To be sure, there is plenty of precisely rendered period detail, from history (McClellan's supporters in the 1864 elections tended to think Lincoln was too soft on the South), manners (Victorian women living alone were not supposed even to own sofas), and language (Gilded Age men dining without their wives were said to be en garcon). But to focus on Auchincloss's Merchant-Ivory side is to reveal one's own shallowness, not his.

Auchincloss's subject is not just the decline and fall of the American WASP elite. It is also the moral failings that sped that fall, and the culture in which its moral failings were embedded. In an afterword to "The Rector of Justin" (1964), Auchincloss wrote: "I had become convinced that the central problem in all New England Protestant church schools . . . was the conflict between the piety and idealism of their inspirers and the crass materialism of the families from which they drew not only their students but their endowments." WASP culture, that is, collapsed for having accentuated the Anglo-Saxon and eliminated the Protestant. But this is not merely a preppy problem. It is the preppy form of an American problem. Observers from Tocqueville to Schumpeter have seen it as the key American problem: the risk that a society will wind up demoralized and undermined by the very dynamism to which it owes its success.

Each of the ten stories in "Manhattan Monologues" is in the first person. Each reflects its narrator's obsession with an incident or situation that takes on a metaphysical significance, as if the "Spoon River Anthology" were set on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Dropping Emerson's name as if he'd just left the cocktail party, alluding to the Ring Cycle as familiarly as to a sitcom, the characters here can sound anachronistic--but they are not. Auchincloss reveres the past, but he does not barricade it against modern consciousness and concerns (as many self-proclaimed modernists do, by setting their fiction in either the academy or the Third World).