The Affluent Society

PURSUIT OF THE PRODIGAL (292 pp.)--Louis Auchincloss--Houghton Mifflin ($3.75).

Lawyer Reese Parmelee is rich, wellborn, intelligent, young, tall and thewed like an ox. He is fearsome in war and agile in the boudoir. He is, in fact, cast from the same heroic mold as George Washington's bronze horse, and his problems, one would think, could hardly be more trying than shooing away the pigeons of circumstance--tax collectors, importunate beauties, photographers wanting to capture his grandeur in whisky ads. Yet Parmelee broods, and it is a credit to the author that readers are persuaded to take it seriously.

The novel upturns sociology; young Parmelee is sound enough, but his world is maladjusted. He belongs to the moneyed society of Long Island, and the vast shingled mansions have deteriorated sadly since the great days of the 'gos. A good deal of the money is still lying around, but so, unfortunately, is the society. Of the buttoned-down youths who lead lives of quiet self-satisfaction, Reese is scornful: "As Christians they have accepted atheism. As Republicans they have accepted socialism. As snobs they have accepted everybody. Yet they still live by forms."

At Parmelee Cove, the elegant estate still ruled by Reese's dotty grandmother, everyone knows the forms by heart. Schools, colleges, clothes, jobs and "marriage partners" all fit an ingrained pattern, and most of the Parmelee grandchildren, clustered with their families around the central money pile, like the arrangement well enough. Reese's wife Esther, who grew up knowing the smell but not the taste of money, venerates the forms as if they were sacraments. To be well bred is to be ill bedded, she thinks, and so she is frigid. But when Reese undertakes a Long Island fling with another man's wife, Esther harries him with hot fury.

Novelist Auchincloss, who has written this sort of book before (The Great World and Timothy Colt, Venus in Sparta), knows his forms and his upper-crust Long Islanders. His description of Esther and the other Parmelee Cove women pursuing the adulterers like a chorus of Eumenides has the rasp of accurate reporting. But if Reese's predicament is real, he himself is sometimes the sort of hero scissored by children from the backs of cereal boxes. His incessant wrestling with the devil is a little sophomoric, and his escape from Parmelee Cove shows the limits of even the best genre writing: Auchincloss can think of nothing better for him to do than marry a penniless fashion magazine editor and barricade himself in a Manhattan town house.

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