Upper Classmates

By James Atlas

THE COUNTRY COUSIN by Louis Auchincloss Houghton Mifflin; 239pages; $8.95

The 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.

In the 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 one Herman Fidler, a rebellious stockbroker who aspires to become a painter. Eventually she marries Jamey Coates, a principled if naive Wall Street lawyer, and saves him through various intrigues from the clutches of an unscrupulous partner who threatens to ruin them both.

But a more profound theme is at work here, signaled by still other literary antecedents. Emulating Henry James' Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, whose admonition is "Live all you can," Amy vows to escape the suffocating restrictions of the bloodless upper class: "Amy was alive; Amy throbbed. For what was life but wanting to live?" Auchincloss's penchant for the portentous flourish has never been more in evidence; in the spirit of a self-help manual rather than a heroine, Amy proclaims to Fidler's wife: "I exist. I feel. You're the one who's concerned with doing. I just am, that's all."

Whenever he finds himself at a loss in the depiction of his characters, Auchincloss resorts to literary reference: Fred Stiles, a colleague of Jamey's, "thought of himself as the hero of a Balzac novel"; Amy complains to her husband, "You're treating me like Nora in A Doll's House"; in a more charitable mood, she broods, "The Bronte governess had found her Rochester!"

Why is Louis Auchincloss so popular? Gore Vidal claims, in a celebrated essay, that Auchincloss is our great chronicler of the upper classes, "the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs." Perhaps readers have wearied, Vidal suggests, of novelists who insist that only the immigrant story deserves to be told or devote themselves to tedious proclamations of selfhood while ignoring the class whose legend is writ in the Social Register. Despite his considerable failings as a novelist, Auchincloss does for that class what John O'Hara did for the country-club set: observes its workings with the tireless zeal of a behavioral scientist in a lab.

The 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.

--James Atlas

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.