If there was to be a Zola of New York, it might have been Louis Auchincloss. Born in 1917 to a family of impeccable pedigree, Auchincloss made a career out of documenting the professional arrangements, private derangements and social displays of New York's old elite. The author of more than 60 books, Auchincloss described in his fiction the privileged, Protestant society that had dominated New York for centuries and the forces that encroached upon that society as he grew older. The basic contours of his charmed life are well known--his Upper East Side childhood; his school years at Groton, Yale and the University of Virginia; his work as a lawyer at a prestigious Wall Street firm--but Auchincloss brings to them new detail and great seriousness in his latest book, the posthumous memoir A Voice From Old New York.

The mood is at once lighthearted and sober. Family events often inspire Auchincloss to reflect on such subjects as the role of Jews in New York society or to provide enjoyable etiquette lessons, which lay bare the tacit agreements and occasional accidents that underpinned public behavior. In the odd, charming chapter "Animal Encounters," Auchincloss tells us how to ship an elephant: "In transporting one of them by air to a zoo, it is wise to prevent their dangerous stamping by placing small animals in their compartment, as they dislike crushing them. On the other hand they will kill a rhino for no reason at all, and a rogue elephant is always to be avoided."

In another book, such excursions would seem like detours from the primary plot, but A Voice From Old New York lacks a central organizing avenue of thought. Chronology is generally but not faithfully adhered to. Rather than arrange his memories into a single narrative, Auchincloss slices his short chapters into smaller pieces, which permits him to skip easily between bits of family lore and personal reminiscences. There is no point to be made, only moods to be indulged; hence such oddities as "Animal Encounters."

AS INVITING AS this casual, conversational arrangement of associations can be, it proves frustrating when the leap is particularly large, or guided by impenetrably private logic, or to an idea Auchincloss has already discussed. The problem is not that he presumes interest where there is none--every memoirist is entitled to assume some--but that he takes advantage of the politely offered ear.

Auchincloss' indifference to his reader is matched by a coldness that emerges in chapters about his less fortunate acquaintances, such as the Yale roommate who had "neither money nor social position." When Auchincloss reprimanded him for conspiring with his father's mistress to conceal from the insurance company the fact that his father's death was a suicide, his friend "blubbered but kept the money." Auchincloss takes this event as evidence of his friend's "bad side."

A number of anecdotes will come as old news to readers familiar with Auchincloss' work or biography, but Auchincloss has a closet full of durable scenes, cut from well-made cloth and sturdy enough to hold up to repeated airings. In one, his wife wonders why they don't socialize with writers more often. Well, if she wants, they can go to Norman Mailer's next party. But, he warns her, not only is it in Brooklyn, it is also on a Wednesday and won't get started before midnight. "Midnight!" she exclaims. "In the middle of the week! No thanks. We working folk will be beddy-bye well before that."

Auchincloss' attachment to this exchange is telling. He saw himself as isolated from other authors, an outsider in their world because he was an insider in another, and both he and his admirers--including his cousin Gore Vidal--often emphasized the unique vantage point his pedigree provided. He stood witness not only to the bedrooms and ballrooms of the rich, but their banks and boardrooms, the places where power was conferred and preserved and compounded. He was a native speaker of the language of our country's rulers and therefore, theoretically, an ideal translator. He could, it was suggested, tell the rest of us how things really happened: Follow the money, and Auchincloss, and find the truth.

His best work bears out such predictions, but even in his finest achievements, such as the exquisite 1964 story "The Landmarker," he proves himself better at observing the manners and dwellings of the rich than understanding the origins and meaning of their influence. There is often in Auchincloss' work a slight missing of the point. To see what he omits, one has only to consider an earlier memoir, in which Auchincloss recalls visiting his father's office, a trip that takes him to the same dark intersection that so disturbed James: "There was Morgan's, there was the stock exchange, there was Wall Street itself. Never shall I forget the horror that was inspired in me by those dark narrow streets and those tall sooty towers and by Trinity Church blocking the horizon with its black spire--a grim phallic symbol." James apprehended the true measure of the towers, seeing in the shape of the city a record of its interests and investments, the bets it was taking on itself. Auchincloss, on the other hand, sees only himself. His visit to his father's firm confirms his belief that the women of his time, like his mother, had one over on the men. As lovely as this description might be, it is not "ironic reflection" but self-reflection.

But it is perhaps the blind spots in Auchincloss' vision that clarify for the reader certain facts about the city where he lived. What he reveals, however accidentally, is how one's own physical and financial security can seduce one into believing that this world is the best world. Insurance becomes assurance, an easy, trusting take on life. The very structure of A Voice From Old New York, which assumes its readers ought to be honored to follow Auchincloss wherever he might go, says as much about the world he inhabited as his words. The somnolent repetitions and arcane allusions, and the patchwork form in which they are presented, show that Auchincloss did not set out to earn his reader's interest. He felt himself entitled to it.

editorial@observer.com

Auchincloss died at the end of January. By mid-April, the three-bedroom apartment at 1111 Park Avenue was listed with Brown Harris Stevens' Mary Rutherfurd and Leslie Coleman (both of whom offered "no comment") for $3.9 million. Now, according to the Web site Streeteasy and sources with knowledge of the deal, the apartment has gone into contract, though the exact price is unknown. Brown Harris Stevens' Kathryn Steinberg, who was squiring the buyer, also declined to comment for this article.

The 14th-floor apartment where Auchincloss penned his novels longhand has both north and east exposures and "very generous proportions." The living room includes a wood-burning fireplace, and elegant prewar moldings frame a formal dining room. The bedroom corridor has a corner master bedroom with an en suite bath, with two additional bedrooms fanning off the other end of the hallway.

And while the listing admits the apartment "needs updating"—a genteel euphemism for renovations—the buyers evidently were not fazed. Perhaps for them, provenance is paramount.

cmalle@observer.com

And so it seems. The critical chronicler of the upper crust, who passed away this January, is still telling us about the role of money, as the 1111 Park Avenue apartment where he scrawled his novels longhand goes on the market for $3.9 million.

The high-floor three-bedroom with "very generous proportions" is listed by Brown Harris Stevens' Mary Rutherford and Leslie Coleman. Asked if Auchincloss' celebrity would garner more interest in the property, Ms. Rutherford told The Observer, "Well, I don't want to comment on anything personal but provenance is always important."

With north and east exposures, the proudly provenanced apartment is "graced with lovely prewar moldings and exceptional light." At the end of the waltzing description, the listing dubiously stipulates, "The apartment has been beautifully maintained but needs updating," which is the same as saying, in a listing for the Tower of Pisa, "It's at a lovely angle but might need a slight realignment."

The author grew up surrounded by the privileged set he so deftly narrated within his more than 60 published works. Though as he once noted, "There was never an Auchincloss fortune. ... Each generation of Auchincloss men either made or married its own money." Louis was no exception. A World War II veteran and a lawyer by trade, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2005 by President Bush and practiced law until 1987.

Memorialized by The New York Times, which had news of the apartment listing earlier this month, as having "a beaky, patrician nose" and a "high-pitched Brahmin accent," Auchincloss' most famous published works are his cross-generational family sagas such as The House of Five Talents, East Side Story and Portrait in Brownstone-all amply foddered by choice real estate, much like the man himself.

cmalle@observer.com

Auchincloss had worked as a lawyer before turning to writing, and became known for his chronicles of the Upper East Side's ruling class. His 1965 novel The Rector of Justin was nominated for a Pulitzer. Contemporary literary trends seemed to move away from Auchincloss's territory, but he objected to that view of things. Wrote New York in 2005:

The novelist bristles at the notion that he and his kin are obsolete. Subject matter aside, he argues, he's not so far off from John Updike-"He might be writing in 1900"-or even Mailer ("if you leave out the four-letter words").

Auchincloss's novels dealt with something timeless: "Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives," Gore Vidal told The Times. Of course, Auchincloss's take on money was hardly Sister Carrie.

The Times obituary quotes his 1974 autobiography:

I grew up with a distinct sense that my parents were only tolerably well off. This is because children always compare their families with wealthier ones, never with poorer. I thought I knew perfectly well what it meant to be rich in New York. If you were rich, you lived in a house with a pompous beaux-arts facade and kept a butler and gave children's parties with spun sugar on the ice cream and little cups of real silver as game prices. If you were not rich you lived in a brownstone with Irish maids who never called you Master Louis and parents who hollered up and down the stairs instead of ringing bells.

Taking the witness stand on Thursday, April 30, Mr. Driscoll also recalled how the centenarian society maven had seemed confused at a lunch in 2003, insisting on paying for her meal with a credit card, as if she were in a restaurant. She was not. She was actually having an informal lunch with New York Times photographer Bill Cunninghmam and Mr. Driscoll at the catering company's headquarters.

Prosecutors are trying to convince jurors that the late Ms. Astor, who suffered from Alzheimer's and died in 2007 at the age of 105, was mentally unsound when she signed over some $60 million of her vast fortune to her only son, Anthony Marshall, 84, who's now facing trial on charges of conspiracy and grand larceny. If convicted, Mr. Marshall faces up to 25 years in prison.

Later in the day, Ms. Astor's longtime friend, the author Louis Auchincloss, told jurors that the last time he ever met the charitable doyenne, at a lunch at the Knickerbocker Club in 2001, she didn't remember him. "She knew she ought to know me," Mr. Auchincloss said. "There was no question about it, she did not know me."

Manhattan art dealer Baird Ryan also testified on Thursday, about the sale of Ms. Astor's most beloved Childe Hassam painting, which once hung prominently in the library of her posh Park Avenue home. (Prosecutors have argued that Mr. Marshall tricked his mother into selling the painting by convincing her that she was going broke.)

Mr. Ryan told jurors he never actually met Ms. Astor. He dealt exclusively with the son, Mr. Marshall, acting as his mother's agent.

Mr. Ryan, the vice-president of Gerald Peters Gallery on the Upper East Side, purchased the painting for $10 million. Prosecutors have charged that Mr. Marshall earned himself a $2 million commission on the deal.

On Wednesday, Mrs. Astor's cousin-in-law, British Lord William Astor, took the witness stand along with Linda Gillies, former director of the family's now-defunct charitable foundation.

Future witnesses are expected to include such luminaries and power brokers as Ms. Walters and Henry Kissinger.

New York Daily News columnist Joanna Malloy, for one, can't wait to hear the testimony of Annette de la Renta:

She once took her private plane from the Dominican Republic just to have lunch with Astor at Holly Hill, and flew back by nightfall.

Boy, that's gonna really hit home with jurors who can barely afford the monthly MetroCard to get to the courthouse.

“In my research for Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets, I’ve come to recognize lying as an inestimable weapon in the female arsenal as women search for personal retribution and satisfaction.” Inestimable weapon? Female arsenal? Personal retribution? Looks like the gender wars are heating up.

A. J. LIEBLING’S WORK as a war correspondent has been collected in a single volume, edited by Pete Hamill: A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings (Library of America, $40). This charming passage is from a dispatch Liebling sent from Paris by “wireless” on Sept. 1, 1944, exactly a week after the city was liberated: “The gratitude toward Americans is immense and sometimes embarrassing in its manifestations. People are always stopping one in the street, pumping one’s hand and saying, ‘Thank you.’ It is useless to protest. To the Parisians, and especially to the children, all Americans are now héros du cinéma. This is particularly disconcerting to sensitive war correspondents, if any, aware, as they are, that these innocent thanks belong to those American combat troops who won the beachhead and then made the breakthrough. There are few such men in Paris. Young women, the first day or two after the Allies arrived, were as enthusiastic as children; they covered the cheeks of French and American soldiers alike with lipstick. This stage of Franco-American relations is approaching an end. Children, however, still follow the American soldiers everywhere, singing the ‘Marseillaise’ and hopefully eyeing pockets from which they think gum might emerge. And it is still hard for an American who speaks French to pay for a drink in a bar.”

BLINK AND YOU'LL miss it: In Larissa MacFarquhar’s genial New Yorker profile of 90-year-old Louis Auchincloss, “East Side Story” (Feb. 25, $4.50), there’s a priceless exchange between our über-WASP hero and Norman Mailer, who was once moved to wonder why he and Mr. Auchincloss were so cordial, even though they had nothing in common. “Nothing in common!” Mr. Auchincloss replied. “We live in the same silly island, publish our wet dreams, and go to the same silly parties—and have for years! It would take a mother’s eye to tell the difference between us. Of course, it is true that I don’t marry quite so much.”

Louis Auchincloss’ fans will be happy to celebrate his 90th birthday later this month with The Headmaster’s Dilemma, a novel that puts his grand total at more than 60 books of assorted fiction and nonfiction. Many were written while he was a partner of Hawkins, Delafield and Wood, a white shoe law firm where his specialty was estates and trusts, which matters figure, too, in his novels, including this one.

As it is with any specialty, the author tends to see the world through the specialist’s glasses: Even when he’s an advocate, Mr. Auchincloss views the entirety of things clearly, with an even-minded cool, and with a dry acknowledgment of the human tendency towards expediency. He’s a man of literary standards, but the tales he’s been writing lately are amorality tales. Then again, perhaps they’ve always been. At any rate, The Headmaster’s Dilemma takes his readers onto familiar turf.

Our hero here is Michael Sayre, a John Kerryish (though not Catholic, of course) figure who is, at 40-something, headmaster of Averhill, a prep school that also figures in “The Devil and Rufus Lockwood,” one of the short stories in The Friend of Women, a collection also published this year.

Auchincloss aficionados will place The Headmaster’s Dilemma at once as a bookend to The Rector of Justin (1964). The new novel takes place a decade or so later, in the mid-70’s, just when universities, colleges and prep schools were undergoing—or not undergoing—that great and elemental transformation: coeducation. (Never mind that the girls admitted were just like the boys, and were indeed often their sisters and cousins—plus ça change, and all that.) Indeed, some weird neologisms and anachronisms and indeed conversations crop up from time to time, like letters floating to the surface in alphabet soup, or like a parent trying to be trendy. But small matter.

Despite the girls, our headmaster’s dilemma involves coping with the fallout from some nasty-nookie-in-the-night between two boys. Not incidentally, these are acts that, if consensual, our author makes clear he regards as run-of-the-mill foreplay to lives of married rectitude. This particular encounter, however, is a different matter, and a lawsuit is brought against the school.

The resolution to the problem is provided by the figure most interesting to us (and, I think, to her creator): the headmaster’s wife, the curiously named Ione, whose biography is worked into the narrative as a kind of sidelong back story.

Ione is a useful figure not only to her spouse, but to Mr. Auchincloss, who has her teach English (so he can discuss Shakespeare) and form a book club (so he can discuss Henry James). She can also think thoughts like these about a potential suitor: “It might even have been, had she cared to boast about it, which she certainly didn’t, a triumph on her part to have subdued so indurated an epicurean to this state, but she could only bitterly regret it.”

Reader, if that sort of sentence sends you, this novel is your cup of tea. It’s a smooth read, but a sharp one. The kind of novel that doesn’t make you happy to be alive—how vulgar would that be?—but happy to be curled up some place pleasantly decorated and well lit, with a book in hand.

Nancy Dalva is senior writer at 2wice.

"They will come no more, / The old men with beautiful manners." So said Ezra Pound in 1915, and history has brought us to a point where, one feels, it must really be true. And so-in a post-9/11, BlackBerry-handheld, 1,000-channel, Jonathan Franzen and Jhumpa Lahiri, Nicky and Paris Hilton world-what on earth are we to make of Louis Auchincloss?

The much-honored Mr. Auchincloss is 86, for much of his life a distinguished Wall Street attorney and, in his spare time, the author of no fewer than 59 books, 42 of which-including his latest, The Scarlet Letters -are works of fiction. As is the case with many a far less prolific author, Mr. Auchincloss' fiction is cut from a single piece of cloth-but in his case, what a long, thick and gorgeous bolt of brocade it is! For his subject is nothing less than America's Manhattan-based WASP ruling elite, an elite which Louis Auchincloss-himself the scion of distinguished Knickerbocker families, a living link to a pre–Gilded Age New York where oil and steel barons were parvenus-knows inside and out.

The Scarlet Letters is his latest meditation on a question he's been turning over and over at least since The Rector of Justin , in 1964: How can a class of people suckled on the sermons of Cotton Mather have fled so swiftly to the lessons of Jay Gould-not to mention those of T. Boone Pickens? Even if hellfire is no longer at issue-as one of the novel's characters notes, " … if God is dead, the devil must be, too"-Mr. Auchincloss remains stubbornly concerned with the souls of his buttoned-up characters.

The soul in question here is that of the piquantly named young attorney Rodman Jessup. In classic Auchinclossian fashion, Rod is well-born (but of modest means), boyishly handsome and preternaturally principled, a rock-ribbed moralist to the core. Having married the daughter of the senior partner of a white-shoe Wall Street law firm, Vollard, Kaye and Duer, Rod quickly rises to prominence by dint of a phenomenal grasp of the subtleties of corporate reorganization, and a character so immaculate that he threatens to quit when his father-in-law proposes to bring in as a client a raffish old Canadian distiller who may once have had some connection with organized crime (anyone come to mind?). Clearly, Rod is cruising for a cosmic bruising, and on this score Mr. Auchincloss doesn't disappoint. Cleverly, he presents us with Rod's fall-triggered by flagrant adultery with a society bimbo-in the book's prologue, and spins out and opens up the action by means of an ever-deepening series of flashbacks.

Is Rodman Jessup merely a star collapsing of its own gravity, "A puritan turned inside out," as his mother-in-law initially wonders? Nothing so simple could occur in Louis Auchincloss' elegantly layered world, where good manners inevitably mask bad ones, and bad ones mask worse. The snake in Rod's Eden is the equally piquantly named Harry Hammersly, an old prep-school classmate who oils his way into Vollard Kaye and hangs his shingle in trusts and estates, where he prospers mightily by sweet-talking credulous widows into making investments which-hey, presto!-help feather his own financial nest. Oh, and along the way, Harry also steals Rod's wife. And once Rod has left the firm in disgrace over his adultery, the villain sharp-elbows his way to the front of the line for senior partnership. And then takes over the whole damn shop.

Is it any wonder that in the scalded aftermath of his fall, Rod wanders into-and then quickly becomes the reigning expert in-the world of corporate takeovers? It's not that he's embraced damnation, but rather that his Manichaean world-view has been brought into the complicated present, a landscape of minutely graded grays. "You forget, my dear," his infinitely wise mother-in-law tells him, "that I grew up in a time when insider trading was a coveted privilege and not a crime. When the maneuvering of stock prices for the benefit of a favored few was considered good business and not a fraud on the public. And where monopoly was God and the Morgan partners his apostles. I learned that morals change with the weather."

Lest this all sound too schematic, let it be known that over the brief (177 pages) and fast-moving course of The Scarlet Letters , the distinguished Mr. A. gives us a rollicking good time. True, as always his characters-even in the heat of unseemly passion-deliver themselves of grammatically perfect utterances, sentences with which Samuel Johnson himself would have no quibble. As ever, the narrative is a veritable raisin pudding of distinguished references-to the Ring Cycle, to Kipling and Shakespeare and Milton and Euripides.

Yet a playful light flickers around the serious proceedings. For starters, there are a couple of dollops of quite hot sex, both hetero and homo, along the way. (Not that his characters have ever shied from their innermost urges, but both the novel's historical period-the early to late 1950's-and Mr. Auchincloss' high-toned authorial nimbus give the naughty bits an extra zing.)

And there are touches that hint at an Olympian chuckle behind the aristocratic deadpan of the novelist's features. What else would possess him to name the firm's senior partner Ambrose Vollard, a clear nod to the legendary Parisian art dealer whose name differs by but a single letter? What else would cause him to introduce a secondary character named Newbold Armstrong, a patent reference to the novelist of New York manners whose middle name was Newbold and who called her protagonist in The Age of Innocence Newland Archer?

Edith Wharton, of course, is the writer to whom Louis Auchincloss has been most consistently compared. Yet Wharton's most poignant plots revolved around outsiders whom society rejected or destroyed, while it's possible to go through any number of Mr. Auchincloss' novels without ever encountering an outsider. He's that rarest of tightrope walkers, a certified member of a closed class who has elected both to ennoble it-by chronicling its rich outer life and exquisite manners in loving detail-and to betray it, by revealing its innermost secrets and desires. The betrayal is to our benefit. The sorrow is that when he's gone, all we'll have left is the people he wrote about.

James Kaplan, the author of Two Guys from Verona , is at work on a new novel.

Louis Auchincloss has always made his readers vaguely uncomfortable. Americans, raised on great national myths like egalitarianism and the meritocracy, prefer not to believe that vast concentrations of power reside in the hands of Eastern bankers and corporate chieftains, who conduct the business of the country from their elegant brownstones, country homes, wood-paneled boardrooms and exclusive clubs. But Mr. Auchincloss takes this situation for granted, and in his books–58 of them in all–he has studied the ruling classes in detail, reporting candidly on their appetites and concerns, their wheeling and dealing, their familial and social pressures.

Mr. Auchincloss belongs to an old New York family. After graduating from Groton and Yale University, he spent most of his life as a Wall Street lawyer, first with Sullivan & Cromwell, then with Hawkins, Delafield & Wood. His fiction deals with what he knows best: that segment of society which Thorstein Veblen memorably called "the radiant center." In many ways, his vantage has been enviable, and he has used it to produce a range of good novels, many fine stories, and at least one certifiable masterpiece, The Rector of Justin , a fictionalized biography of a headmaster, the Reverend Francis Prescott–a figure not unlike the famous Endicott Peabody of Groton. Prescott's dilemma was the hypocritical distance he sensed between his own Christian ideals and the crass ambitions of his clientele. It's a blistering portrait of a class that has not, since Henry James, been properly observed–a novel of unswerving moral scrutiny that should sit on the shelf of any serious reader of American fiction.

Her Infinite Variety is the author's latest, a breezy tour of New York's business and publishing aristocracy during the middle decades of the 20th century. At 82, Mr. Auchincloss is writing rather well, even showing signs of development as he tracks the upward spiral through society and the publishing world of Clara Longcope Hoyt Tyler. The feisty daughter of a rumpled Yale professor and a mother keen to climb the social hierarchy, Clara fairly bursts with ambition. "The great thing is not to be ordinary," Violet Longcope tells her daughter at the novel's outset, but Clara is the last person in the world to need this advice.

The novel gets underway swiftly as Violet surveys the field and considers her daughter's prospects. The beautiful young Vassar graduate puts a wrong foot forward by getting engaged to Bobbie Lester, a "handsome and athletic and cheerful and idealistic" young man who is obviously destined for the faculty of a second-rate prep school in rural New England. This will not do for Violet, and Clara gets the message. She jettisons poor Bobbie for Trevor Hoyt, the glistening heir of a New York banking fortune. Given her attributes, Clara is welcomed into the Hoyt fold. Mr. Auchincloss writes of Trevor's parents: "They evidently wanted to get their boy settled, and wasn't the lovely Miss Longcope with her bright eyes and bright mind and unimpeachable academic background just what the doctor ordered?"

Two years later, Clara is settled in a lovely Park Avenue duplex and "the weekend mistress of the tastefully redecorated red brick gatehouse of her parents-in-law's Georgian mansion on Long Island's north shore." At times, one winces a bit as Mr. Auchincloss describes the architectural wonders of the upper classes. At their worst, these passages read like excerpts from House and Garden , as when Clara goes over to the "big house" to consult with her mother-in-law. She waits to speak to the formidable Mrs. Hoyt "in the big formal drawing room that looked out over a wide terrace to a lawn watered by twirling sprinklers. The high-ceilinged chamber, with its fine English eighteenth-century furniture and large family portraits, just escaped, as did the square Georgian mansion itself, being pompous."

Quickly tired of life as a rich man's doll, Clara takes a job at a woman's magazine called "Style," one of many publications in the portfolio of Eric Tyler, an old-fashioned media mogul. The reader is swept by Mr. Auchincloss from scene to scene, decade to decade, with amazing speed; in fact, Her Infinite Variety often feels sketchy, an outline for a much longer and more detailed (and more fully dramatized) novel. One never really gets to know anyone except Clara very well, and even she is puzzling in her way: Though she retains many of the traditional values that typically constitute an Auchincloss heroine, Clara's ambitions for herself are nothing less than ruthless, and she is capable of Machiavellian callousness in the cause of her own social and economic advancement. In many ways, Clara has simply appropriated the questionable values usually ascribed to men (in novels as well as "real" life) in the pursuit of power.

Mr. Auchincloss has always been good on women. One thinks immediately of Augusta (Gussie) Millinder, the cultured narrator of his remarkable early work, The House of Five Talents (1960); Gussie displays a sharp eye for art and architecture as she describes the houses and gardens around her, but she is also an astute observer of society at large. Two years later Mr. Auchincloss published Portrait in Brownstone , a strong novel that features Ida Denison, a stalwart heroine whose loyalty to clan and class remain unshakable in the face of a hideous marriage and other disastrous circumstances. For the most part, Mr. Auchincloss' women resemble Gussie and Ida: proud of their families, loyal to their class, idealistic in an innocent way. The men, by contrast, are deal-makers, guided by expedience; they feign "family values" in the presence of their women, but they are quite unfazed by the double standard that lets them roam the field into their dotage, if they so wish.

Hence the "development" mentioned above. Mr. Auchincloss attacks that double standard head-on in Her Infinite Variety , showing poignantly that his heroine, Clara, is unfairly called onto the carpet for having a brief affair during the war while her husband, in London, feels perfectly free to behave as he pleases, leaping from bed to bed with impunity. But Clara is no doormat. If anything, she is ready and willing to do whatever it takes to win, and Mr. Auchincloss seems to admire her opportunism as she marries Eric Tyler, the mogul, then fends off Tyler's son to win ultimate control of the publishing empire, which she uses to further her political and social ambitions. Is the transformation of Clara–achieved in just over 200 pages–believable? I think not. But I confess to reading her story with delight, and to admiring the skill with which her world is conjured.

It would be easy to call Mr. Auchincloss a kind of poor man's Henry James. He loves James, of course, and has published a wonderful little book called Reading Henry James (1975)–the sort of casual, clear-eyed criticism one longs for in this age of poststructuralist jabberwocky. Like James, his fiction concentrates on wealthy and influential people, and he is fascinated by society. But James usually took his rich Americans off to Europe; he made it possible to draw comparisons between the New World and the Old–the great Jamesian theme. James' prose is bizarrely original and ornate, and he probes the inner consciousness of his characters in astonishing depth. Mr. Auchincloss, by contrast, allows his wealthy Americans to stay at home, where he examines their lives with a shrewd, often bemused, objectivity. Though eloquent, he is finally a plain stylist whose characterizations rarely move beyond the external. He remains, however, a natural storyteller and an artful historian of New York's ruling class.

In his lovely memoir, A Writer's Capital (1974), he describes the origins of his art quite frankly: "I observed that often the only interesting thing about some of the families near whom we lived was their wealth." From this initial wry observation, many volumes of amplification have unfolded–a remarkable shelf of books by one of our most useful and intelligent writers.

Jay Parini teaches at Middlebury College. His most recent book is Robert Frost: A Life ( Henry Holt).