One has striven, in these columns, to suggest each August a novel with some relevance to what we do. The pickings there are exceedingly slim, but there’s one real standout from the second half of the twentieth century.

Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010) was our last great novelist of manners, in the tradition of Henry James and Edith Wharton – artists whom Auchincloss admired, and about whom he wrote perceptively. He was also a consummate insider – someone who told stories of New York society from deep personal experience and understanding, as distinct from his contemporary John O’Hara, and especially from perhaps the ultimate outsider, Scott Fitzgerald.

And so it was that, two decades on from the events, Auchincloss turned for a novelistic subject to the defalcation of the New York Stock Exchange’s flamboyant 1929 champion, Richard Whitney. Scion of a family that came over on the Arbella, product of Groton and Harvard, the living embodiment of the Exchange itself, Richard Whitney would be unmasked in the 1930s – at the very moment the moneyed, WASP, Wall Street establishment was at its most embattled – as the tawdriest imaginable embezzler.

But it wasn’t the sordid nature of Whitney’s crime that would fascinate an Auchincloss. It was that Whitney was, above all, a traitor to his (and the novelist’s) class. This is the beating heart of his 1966 novel The Embezzler, in much the same way that John le Carré would go in search, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, of the aristocratic Soviet spy Kim Philby. The question at the center of both books is the same: what would prompt the beneficiary of all his class’s prodigious gifts to turn traitor to that class?  

Auchincloss’s first-person narrator Guy Prime stands in for Whitney, as Bill Haydon stands in for Philby, but to say that the real subjects are thinly disguised would be a misnomer: they aren’t disguised at all. In both cases, that’s irrelevant to the novelist’s point, which is the attempt to make some kind of coherent sense of their famous treasons.

If by the time you finish reading The Embezzler you aren’t that much closer to understanding Guy Prime than you were at the beginning, you’ve still read a masterful story by (in every sense) a first-class novelist.

 

© 2017 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.