The Anniversary
And Other Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From a New York Times–bestselling author: A collection of short fiction "reminiscent of the work of Henry James and Edith Wharton" (Library Journal).
Crisscrossing a tumultuous century, these stories evoke lives both blessed and cursed by good fortune and reveal the quotidian conflicts of a wonderfully rich milieu. Here are vignettes that capture the loves and jealousies of marriage and friendship, recall days of a rarefied aristocracy, and hint at a new, ambitious young elite.
In the title story, a tour de force of humor and emotion, a clergyman prepares a toast for his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary but gets stuck when it comes to his wife's five-year affair. The narrator in "DeCicco v. Schweizer" imagines the lives of the plaintiff and defendant and spins a wicked tale about a 1902 marriage born more of convenience than of love. And in "The Last of the Great Courtesans," we meet the unforgettable Milly Marion, born in 1917, who has bewitched everyone she has met in her long, colorful life.
Whether these stories concern an anxious draft dodger, a repentant headmaster, or a mischievous writer who ill-advisedly draws from her own family for her fiction, they all offer soulful glimpses into an uncommon world, preserved in our past and yet surprisingly close to our hearts.
"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 . . . It's easy to get lost in the author's elegant and restrained prose." —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These nine previously unpublished stories feature the author's usual preoccupations: the WASP aristocracy confronting moral dilemmas in the boardrooms, prep schools and churches of Manhattan,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.
