Cul-de-Sac

By Gerald Clarke

THE BOOK CLASS

by Louis Auchincloss

Houghton Mifflin; 212 pages; $14.95

Most American novelists are firmly rooted in the middle class, and when they write about their social betters, they are usually a little uncomfortable, like a stranger at a grand dinner who furtively watches to see which of the many forks the hostess will pick up next. Louis Auchincloss was born to that elevated society, however. He is, as reviewers always note, perhaps the only living example of the novelist of manners,, the last descendant of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

And so he is, but within much stricter and by now familiar limitations. The Book Class, his 27th work of fiction, is, like most of its predecessors, a study of a small group of people who live on Manhattan's Upper East Side, belong to the Knickerbocker and Colony clubs, send their sons to schools such as Groton and Yale (the author's alma maters), and consider the Rockefellers, who came into their billions less than a century ago, slightly parvenu. This time around, Auchincloss is concerned with the female of that rare and resplendent species: twelve women who met once a month, from 1908 to 1972, to enrich themselves still further by discussing a book. The narrator, Christopher Gates, is the decorator son of one of the dozen in the Book Class. He believes that they and their peers had a remarkable and unrecorded influence on New York, and hence America, in the days before women "got sidetracked in the dreary cul-de-sac of men's jobs." He makes it his task to write their history and, through the mechanics of the sometimes awkward plot, persuades nearly every one of them to pour out her heart.

And such curiously hard, or perhaps hardened, hearts they are. The women are determined at all costs to preserve their families and their names. Justine Bannard has accepted for years the philandering of her handsome architect husband Chester. When he threatens to run off with the beautiful wife of one of his clients, however, Justine takes action. She does not scream, shout or cry, this woman of Roman virtue; that would send him flying. Instead she talks to the other husband; they agree not only to offer their errant spouses their freedom, but to give them allowances as well (in Auchincloss's world it is often the women who have the money). "Our job," says Justine, "is to strip their fantasy of its glamour. The first thing to remove is its illegality. They must feel free to marry." Her subtle plan works, of course: the family remains intact, at least on the surface.

The narrator is a boy in prep school, a classmate of Justine's son's, when he hears that story. Over the next half-century he uncovers the others, until, around 1980, he interviews one of the last survivors, Maud Erskine, who is 93. "I suppose it's appropriate that the Book Class should end in a book," she says.

Perhaps. But this sporadically entertaining example reads more like an outline for a novel than a novel itself. Auchincloss may know better than any other practicing writer that rarefied world of old New York money, but he also knows less than many others how to write a vivid story. The trouble is that he tells enough about his subject to make it interesting, but not enough to make it the stuff of memory or dreams. --By Gerald Clarke