Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday December 15, 2010
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A VOICE FROM OLD NEW YORK: A Memoir of My Youth
Louis Auchincloss
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0547341538
203 pages
$25
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
Louis Auchincloss, who died last January at the age of 92, had one of the most remarkable careers in American literature.
Beginning in 1947 with the publication of his first novel, "The Indifferent Children," he published 47 novels and short-story collections and 19 works of nonfiction, the last of which is this posthumous memoir, "A Voice from Old New York." More remarkably, his sheer fecundity is matched if not exceeded by the literary quality and intellectual reach of his books. Too often pigeonholed and/or dismissed as a mere chronicler of the manners of the Northeastern upper class, he was in fact a writer of rare skill and range, and his best books should find readers for a long time.
He reached his peak with the successive publication between 1960 and 1966 of five works of fiction: "The House of Five Talents," "Portrait in Brownstone," "Powers of Attorney," "The Rector of Justin" and "The Embezzler." Two aspects of this extraordinary winning streak must be noted. The first is that none of these books received any major or minor literary prizes. The second is that all of them -- like everything he published between 1954 and 1986 -- were written while Auchincloss pursued a busy, "limited but happy" career as a Manhattan lawyer specializing in wills and trusts, giving him particular insights into the private lives of those who inhabited the world into which he had been born in the fall of 1917:
"In the 1920s and '30s there existed indubitably, however hard to define, a social structure called 'society' that regarded itself as just that. These persons resided on the East Side of Manhattan (never west except below Fifty-ninth Street) as far south as Union Square and as far north as Ninety-sixth Street. The members (if that is the word; it doesn't seem quite right) were largely Protestants of Anglo-Saxon origin. (Note that Catholics and nonpracticing Jews were not always excluded if rich enough.) The men were apt to be in business, finance, or law, sometimes in medicine, rarely in the church and almost never in politics. Franklin Roosevelt was an exception and not a popular one, either."
In setting down that last observation, Auchincloss no doubt had his tongue in his cheek, since no one knew better than he just how narrow and insular the world of New York "society" really was. Perhaps he had in mind Peter Arno's famous cartoon from the New Yorker, in which one group of well-dressed socialites urges another: "Come along. We're going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt." He also knew something that his critics never understood, whether willfully or out of ignorance I cannot say, though I suspect a combination of the two: that however narrow and insular that world, it was merely the larger world in privileged microcosm, with rules and customs that, however peculiar, could be explored to shed light on the more universal human condition.
Auchincloss was last in the line of important American novelists of manners that stretched from Edith Wharton through John P. Marquand and John Cheever to himself, with a number of lesser figures along the way. Why this line has ended is a mystery, though probably it has to do with the trend toward writerly self-absorption that has taken over literary American fiction since the 1960s. The novelist of manners must be more interested in other people than in himself, and that, unfortunately, is not often found in the places where ostensibly "serious" fiction is now written.
It is also true that interest in what remains of the old American upper class no longer exists, so even if there were people who wanted to write about it, they probably would have a very hard time finding publishers. It is easy to imagine a member of the creative-writing professoriat recoiling in horror from Auchincloss' description of the household over which his father presided:
"To support his devoted wife and children he could count, in the year 1931 for example, on the following assets: a modest but ample brownstone in Manhattan; a house in Long Island for weekends and summer; a rented villa in Bar Harbor, Maine, for July; four housemaids; two children's nurses; a couple to maintain the Long Island abode; a chauffeur and four cars; several social clubs; and private schools for the children. ... My father managed all of the above on an income of a hundred thousand dollars a year, out of which he managed to make an annual saving. Of course the dollar went further then, but still. Yet it never occurred to me that we were rich. We lived only as other successful lawyers' and doctors' families did."
Small world indeed, and Auchincloss spent his entire life in it except during World War II, when "I served as a naval officer and found myself in some tight spots, particularly in the English Channel where my LST operated as a kind of military ferry between the English ports and the Normandy coast." He went to private elementary school in Manhattan -- "a great blessing, for getting to know some Jewish boys made me question the casual anti-Semitism that sprinkled the conversation at home and in the houses of family friends and relations" -- and then was shipped off to boarding school at Groton, the inspiration though not the model for his masterly "The Rector of Justin." His class there was distinguished: "I used to say to my father: 'If my classmates should ever run this country all would be well.' The irony of my life is that they did indeed have a hand in it. And every one of them was a fervent backer of the war in Vietnam."
From Groton he went to Yale, didn't finish there, but graduated from law school at the University of Virginia. In 1941 he became a clerk at one of the big Wall Street law firms. After the war, though, "the apprehension that I might have chosen the wrong career had already begun to haunt me." He had been bitten by the urge to write at Yale and now wondered, "Might I not in some fashion combine the law with literature?" He left the law for two-and-a-half years, beginning his writing life, and when he "returned permanently to the law" he "became a partner in a much smaller firm." By then he had published three novels and a short-story collection, and if anything he increased his productivity as he settled in at Hawkins, Delafield and Wood.
"As my writing career advanced," he says, "it seemed that, aside from the specific preoccupations of the characters and the stories themselves, a particular preoccupation emerged: class. Given what I have told you so far about my life and upbringing, it would have been shocking had the subject not been one of my major concerns. Class, whether real or imagined, is a subject of interest in America far greater than its actual existence would seem to justify." Whether that is still the case seems to me doubtful. Americans now are more interested in wealth rather than class as a demarcation of social standing, and of course what the late journalist Joseph Alsop called "the WASP Ascendancy" has long since faded into the background, its preppy style imitated by Ralph Lauren and others but its long reign far in the distant past.
Auchincloss, who was richly endowed with the redeeming powers of humor and irony, is unapologetic about having been a member of this class -- as close to an aristocracy as this country has ever come -- and does not mourn its evanescence. It provided him with a rich subject for an amazing body of writing, and he made the most of it. "A Voice from Old New York" brings his career to a fit conclusion, a fine little book that may help readers understand that his literary legacy is far more complex and durable than most of his critics acknowledge.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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SUNSET PARK
Paul Auster
Henry Holt
ISBN 978-0805092868
308 pages
$25
Reviewed by Rodney Welch, who frequently reviews books for the Columbia, S.C., Free-Times
People do a lot of vanishing in Paul Auster's novels, and in any number of ways. Some desert their homes, adopt alternate personas, hand their lives over to someone else, or simply take a hike into the imagination. Some want to get away, or pay for their sins, or commit virtual suicide by obliterating their old life.
Usually, they are writers of one kind or another, who need to control the shape of their story. They also need an audience, despite their desire to stay hidden. There's Effing in "Moon Palace," who finds a hapless young man to listen as he dictates the account of how he faked his death, and Hector in "The Book of Illusions," a faded film star who devotes his life to making films that he can't show.
Auster is fascinated by absence, by the holes people create when they aren't there, particularly as it involves fathers and sons. His protagonists are sometimes rootless, orphaned young men, on a lifelong Oedipal odyssey for either a real father or a surrogate. These themes are recycled yet again in his latest novel, "Sunset Park," a curious ensemble piece with a lot of characters but not enough story to keep them interesting.
The young man is Miles Heller, a 28-year-old exile from a moderately well-to-do New York family. More than seven years ago, he went into hiding, wracked with guilt over his inadvertent role in the death of his stepbrother, Bobby, when both boys were in their teens. He's been wandering the country ever since, winding up in Florida, where he finds a job cleaning out repossessed homes and starts dating a 17-year-old Cuban hottie named Pilar.
When Pilar's greedy sister tries to blackmail Miles over sleeping with a minor, he takes up the invitation of an old friend, Bing, to join him in a squatters' settlement in Sunset Park, a run-down neighborhood in Auster's old stomping grounds of Brooklyn. Here, Bing runs a small business, the Hospital for Broken Things, where he fixes old manual typewriters, record players, rotary phones and anything else that's been discarded by modern high-tech culture.
Besides being Miles' most loyal friend, Bing is also the secret conduit to the Heller family, whom he alerts to the whereabouts of their missing son. Tension is in the air: Will Miles come home, and how should his family approach him if he does? Dealing with this question are Miles' father, Morris, who runs a small but esteemed indie press; his chilly stepmother, Willa, who was Bobby's mother; and Miles' own mother, Mary-Lee, a self-absorbed, somewhat disturbing woman who long ago fled the scene to become a famous actress. At the house in Sunset Park, Miles' roommates are two young women: bookish, weight-obsessed, college student Alice, and suicidal, sex-obsessed Ellen, who works as a real estate agent.
Auster wanders among all these characters, devoting chapters to each, teasing out connections of no particular interest. What do they all have in common? Only what's obvious. They're all broken, apparently, either because of age or decline or because they are out of date -- decent, creative people who have been cast aside by a world devoted to making a buck.
Morris sells good literature despite a depressed market. Ellen, who draws almost as many penises as the kid in "Superbad," works to reignite her artistic career. Alice divides her time between scrutinizing "The Best Years of Our Lives" for her dissertation and working for a pittance at PEN International, where she writes letters in hopes of freeing jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo. (High five, Alice. At least Sweden heard you.) There's a lot of talk about luck, who has it and who doesn't, and people replay their lives, posing big what-if questions. Morris wonders if he should have married his second wife first, Bing wonders if he's gay, everyone wonders if the brooding and immensely good-looking Miles will sleep with them, and Miles wonders how fate intervened in his own life.
One minor character, Morris' novelist pal, Renzo, considers writing an essay on "the things that don't happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered." There's also the not-explained, such as why, when fate decides to interact with these characters, all it does is make everyone watch "The Best Years of Our Lives." The book could also use more of the not-expected, all hopes for which gradually vanish as the book slogs on.
In the end, "Sunset Park" feels like a needless bid for relevancy, an attempt to engage with the post-crash, post-literate, homeless culture, rigged to let Auster address whatever was on his mind when he sat down to write. He even shuts down the book for five pages to extol the virtues of PEN International. The result is a very moody "mood of the country" novel, a book of many parts that never really cohere in a satisfying way.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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