New York Stories

Christopher Caldwell on the fiction of Louis Auchincloss:

The world Auchincloss describes is one in which every prerogative is owed to age--not out of filial piety or a sense of tradition, but because the elderly tend to have a stranglehold on family capital. A favorite Auchincloss theme is the way those whose lives are already behind them reach out to poison all the sexual, intellectual, idealistic, and even ethical promise of youth--to poison anything inconsistent with dynasty-formation, the moral order, or the moneyed person's whims, which grow increasingly hard to distinguish.