The Scarlet Letters.

• Author: Cruz, Nestor Enrique
• Position: Book Review

The Scarlet Letters By Louis Auchincloss

At age 86 most lawyers have retired to enjoy their grandchildren and the fruits of their labor. Louis Auchincloss, attorney and novelist, however, is still working at his second career. For many years a trusts and estates lawyer at a prestigious Manhattan law firm, Auchincloss began publishing short stories and novels as a sideline. His practice provided rich sources for characters and plots. At some point he decided that he wanted to write full time and left the practice of law. Nevertheless, many of his navels and stories, including the novel under review, deal with lawyers and law firms, usually in a Wall Street setting, with investment bankers or wealthy testators as clients.

In this, as in other Auchincloss works of fiction, the plot is merely incidental to rich characterization. In this novel, and without giving anything away, the story involves three adulteries, hence the title, linking the lawyers and clients of a Wall Street law firm. Auchincloss intertwines the personal and professional lives of his characters giving the reader an insight into the working of great New York law firms, their lawyers, spouses, and clients. The author brings to this novel his usual highly polished prose, a sense of irony and detachment, sympathy for the problems of his affluent characters, and a sense that their lives are neither tragic nor comical, just simply different from ours.

Auchincloss has received bad press from academics. He writes in the style of Henry James and William Dean Howells, his literary heroes and ancestors, never deals with contemporary social problems, and his characters are seldom poor. They may not all be wealthy. Some, in...