Claustrophobia Acres

THE ENCLOSURE (280 pp.)--Ethan Ayer --Little, Brown ($3).

"The very rich," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in one of his short stories, "are different from you and me." "Yes," was the sardonic comment of Ernest Hemingway, "they have more money."

Just how "different" the rich are has long been a fascinating problem for U.S. novelists, but few have been able to do much with it. Like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, most U.S. writers have been too middle class. Ethan Ayer, 31, the Brooks School, Trinity College, and (says his dust jacket) of "a well-known riding and hunting family," should presumably be able to write about wealth with the fullness of first-hand knowledge. In The Enclosure, a first novel, he has tried hard, but he has not quite turned the trick.

Farewell to the Grand Style. The Enclosure is an exclusive suburb obviously set on Boston's North Shore. A faintly Renaissance gate opening on ten driveways, houses ranging in style from Jacobean to classical revival, a very private beach, old families not merely rich but entirely accustomed to it--this is the special world about which Ethan Ayer writes. His book is a portfolio of vignettes: the well-bred old snobs, the new, vulgar rich, the wealthy young weaklings and, behind all these, the pompous and romantic servants.

Characters wander in & out of The Enclosure as if it were a transient hotel. Its reigning matriarch, Mrs. Halstead, dies, and with her goes the grand style of life. She had been, as one of the Enclosure stalwarts put it, "the only one around here worth the powder to blow her to hell." Those who survive are a sad lot: her son Christopher, a bilious minister devoted to the comforts of the flesh; her grandson Christopher Jr., a well-read neurotic who fritters himself away in hypochondria; her neighbor Moylan Stacy, an undertaker new to the Enclosure and representing the crudity of the new rich; a dilettante who sponsors opera stars for the sake of art and, sometimes, for the sake of his puny passions.

Enter the Psychiatrist. As these creatures go through the motions of life, the Enclosure gradually changes character. The undertaker's daughter marries neurotic young Christopher when her true love, a handsome servant boy, is killed. The marriage is a wretched failure. Undertaker Stacy becomes a doddering old invalid, still at odds with the Enclosure. The walls of the Enclosure itself begin to tumble down: one of the best houses, it is rumored, will soon be taken over by a psychiatrist for a rest home.

Though he is clearly talented, Novelist Ayer has written a book that is long on artiness and short on life, full of mincing chatter and burdened with too complex a structure. His final approach to his people is as simple and inadequate as a cliche: the rich, he feels, stink. This may or may not be true, but his novel never gets close enough to his people to prove it. What was meant as a clever portrait of social decay pretty much ends as a mannered exercise in claustrophobia.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.