The Anniversary and Other Stories

June 28, 1999
These nine previously unpublished stories feature the author's usual preoccupations: the WASP aristocracy confronting moral dilemmas in the boardrooms, prep schools and churches of Manhattan, Westchester and Newport from the Gilded Age to the present. The husbands wrestle with the infidelity of their lovely, penitent wives ("The Interlude," "The Anniversary"); with sexual improprieties at a posh prep school ("The Devil and Guy Lansing"); with reconciling the urge to follow one's muse as poet or to serve one's country in battle ("Man of Renaissance"). The author pays overt homage to James and Wharton, who explored similar themes with inimitable grace and subtlety. Here, however, the characters verge on banal, the dialogue is stilted and the snobbery oppressive. The intrusion of real-life figures--Henry James is one character's cousin; Frank Lloyd Wright designs a house for patrician newlyweds, and Julia Ward Howe appears in the last story, "The Veteran," ready to recite her "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to an elite audience in Newport--points up the insubstantiality of Auchincloss's characterizations. The prose is arch, stagy, sometimes risible. One narrator admits, "In the tumultuous fury of my mind in the next few days I must have waxed almost irrational"; a Yale-educated painter asks the glittering opportunist sitting for her portrait, "Wasn't Paul a perfectly competent lover?" The reply: "He was. Very male. But with Eric I was in the hands of a master." Theodore Roosevelt himself, advising a gifted poet to seriously turn his attention to politics, concedes, "Poetry is bully!" While his early novels (The Rector of Justin) and previous story collections are certain to assure Auchincloss a preeminent place in American letters, this later short fiction may strike a young audience as already dated.

March 1, 1999
The great celebrant of the WASP ascendancy offers nine stories, all previously unpublished.

May 15, 1999
If you're reading about old money versus new, derelict southern plantations, Newport mansions, veterans of the Great War, and the complex social strata of turn-of-the-century New York, you're deep in Auchincloss territory. In this collection of nine stories, he studies people of the generation or two that came of age before most of us were born, in terms ("courtesan," "headmaster") hardly heard anymore. Since Auchincloss never ventures here beyond the mid-1950s or so, one might ask what relevance his stories have for today's readers. But, in fact, his themes are universal--ambition, greed, disappointment, compromise. Some of the most memorable characters are women, trying to find their way in a time of more restricted choices. For instance, Angelica Brook struggles to reconcile herself to her new role as wife, mother, and hostess after giving up a career in law, in "The Interlude"; and Milly Marion achieves power by marrying a wealthy man, in "The Last of the Great Courtesans." It's easy to get lost in the author's elegant and restrained prose. ((Reviewed May 15, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)