February 1961
The writing of this extremely accomplished novelist has a style which, as well as being its own, is strikingly European. Whistler and Henry James both lived and worked here, but while their subject matters were naturally taken from what came to their hands, their styles - and if they were not both stylists, they were both tremendously concerned with style - would never have been described as predominantly American. The same might be said of Auchincloss, although he is dealing with America and Americans, but here - at least - he contrives to give a different slant upon some of them which is detached without being an alien’s point of view.
The novel is about a fortune made by a Julius Millinder, a German immigrant of the 1850’s but the book is more a history of a fortune than of a family, and he is dying in his huge brownstone house in the middle of New York at the beginning of the story, which is told by one of his granddaughters, Augusta Millinder. The money is principally divided between two of his sons whose wives build gigantic houses in Newport and generally vie with each other in displaying their vast wealth. The children grow up embedded in this display, and although the story shifts its focus from one member of the family to another, it is always through the ageing Augusta’s eyes that we observe them - trying to make and to change and to break each attitude which they have inherited or acquired towards their money. Augusta never marries, and having helped her indomitable mother through her last (discriminating magpie) phase she remains in the brownstone house, a certain old maid, lonely, gruff and bulky, the dullness of her life relieved only by family crises.
What makes this a remarkable and fascinatingly readable novel is the author’s extraordinary grip over this large, ramifying situation. He never loses his sure and acute sense of period, and he never steps outside Gussie’s experience or nature, while at the same time showing through her the shift of certain values between 1886 when the book opens until 1948 when it closes. One watches the cycle of this money being displayed with the utmost ostentation, being lost, being made, being spent, being invested and being concealed, until I had the feeling that it was very like an ocean dominating these people’s lives in which they had to float, or paddle, or swim, or drown without any of them in the least affecting it. A brilliantly good book.