Happy 90th, Louis Auchincloss, And Kudos On Book #65

The Headmaster's Dilemma -- A Novel by Louis Auchincloss, Houghton Mifflin '07, $25, 177 pages, ISBN #0618883428.

Perhaps it's the novelist's age or maybe it comes from the fact he so obviously emulates Henry James, but Louis Auchincloss novels, written as they usually are about the upper classes, embody a quaintness akin to the feeling of a baseball fan stepping back into time by watching a Wrigley Field day game, with no lights and manual scoreboards.

While book #65 (Whew! And consider he spent a lifetime practicing law as well) is set in post-Vietnam years, its forty year old protagonists still call each other darling and dearest. Auchincloss makes no secret of his privileged, prep school background, and in keeping with the adage about writing what you know, we find his characters ensconsed in a New England boarding school (The author attended St. Bernard's and Groton).

In Auchincloss's prep school days, such environ were cocoons, isolated from the cares of the outside world. But Michael Sayre, headmaster of Averhill, is a new breed, committed to co-education and diversity, a philosophy that is chalk on the blackboard to his hidebound trustees.

Sex, mostly of the boy-on-boy variety, permeates the novel, which revolves around an alleged assault by a prefect on one of his charges and what, if anything, ought to be done about it. But other tensions course through as well, such as those generated by Trustee President Donald Spencer, an arch-conservative fellow and former Sayre classmate, who never seems to have gotten over the fact that boys in the shower teased him about his rather minimal endowment (not of the financial variety).

Auchincloss's narrative style is more mannered than stilted, and it's refreshing to read sentences that could have come from Edith Wharton in a book centered in the last half of the 20th century. I suspect it's the inherent separateness of boarding school life that keeps the prose from feeling discordant.

Louis Auchincloss, today is your 90th birthday. May it be a happy one!