The Embezzler

Louis Auchincloss

The Rich Get Richer – If Edith Wharton was the great chronicler of the Gilded Age, Louis Auchincloss was the great chronicler of the Establishment. This superb novel – published in 1966 and, sadly, like the rest of Auchincloss’ works, now out of print – is told in three parts from three perspectives: Guy, the embezzler; Rex, his friend and nemesis; Angelica, his wife. “I have the distinction of having become a legend in my lifetime,” Guy tells us in the beginning, “but not a very nice one.” Guy and Rex are Wall Streeters. Angelica might be the most wily of the three. “Of all our novelists,” Gore Vidal once observed, “Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs … Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.” Auchincloss died in 2010 at the age of 92 after writing and publishing more than 60 books. Too bad he isn’t still alive and writing today, illuminating this new Era of the One-Percenters.