Diary of a Yuppie
Auchincloss, Louis
There it is again: the hated "y" word. Yuppie. . . . The word trips from the tongue like a small belch. A glottal stop followed by too many p's—a rude combination. What's worse, it is also a...
...But how many yuppies spend their time in after-hours clubs chatting up girls with shaved heads...
...Well, Auchincloss, now in his seventieth year, wasn't even born after World War I. His literary values are not even of this century, much less this decade...
...A conservative attack on the New Breed, from the ranks of the Old Monied, would have made for a much gamier read...
...A man could go right up to the threshold of crime," he muses, "but not a step farther...
...Auchincloss, however, is not really the man to do it...
...Is there, perhaps, some latter-day Flaubert on the Hudson waiting to paint the pastel tedium of life among the yuppies: its Reebok romances and microwaved success stories...
...But his fiction seems hopelessly antiquated in the 1980s...
...Service, 32, associate in the fictional law firm of Hoyt, Welles & Andrew ("thirty-six partners, a hundred clerks"), and the other, Auchincloss's old nemesis—money...
...What's worse, it is also a hideous cliche for which no adequate synonyms have yet been developed...
...Auchincloss's dark, Jamesian seriousness seems too dour a voice for the task...
...In the hands of a lesser novelist, the narrative might have taken on a pulpy Krantzian tone at this point...
...Then I grew up...
...rue, the issue of yuppie ethics, such as they are, deserves a more profound analysis than it is likely to receive in New York magazine, or any of the coffee-table press...
...He shunned les basfonds and never learned, as Auden said, "how to be plain and awkward . . . among the Filthy filthy too...
...the world of high finance and high society...
...If nothing else, the yuppies will at least command a sentence in the history books as the world's first generation of vidiots...
...Bright Lights, like Martin Scorcese's film After Hours, is an urban professional's nightmare...
...Not a bad philosophy, by Wall Street standards—indeed, one might want to hire such a man around tax time—but it drives him from his law firm, and his loving wife Alice...
...Living rooms, for one, have televisions—an apparatus that Auchincloss ignores with silent contempt...
...Like Auchincloss's 1960s bestseller...
...There is sex in Diary of a Yuppie, but it is never crummy, and by modern standards (and my own prurient ones), there isn't nearly enough of it...
...Once he gets a whiff of power, he also finds himself drawn to the feline scent of a woman, Sylvia Sands, who like Service is heatedly clawing her way to the tip of Manhattan society...
...No, what is needed is a narrator with a cruder sense of irony than the sensitive "artist" of Mclnerney's book...
...What could be duller, one might ask (chortling knowingly), than the diary of a yuppie...
...We are thus introduced to the two protagonists: one being Robert Richard T. Marin is an assistant editor of Harper's...
...It was once said of his novels that they represented a museum of all that American writing valued before World War I. His characters have always inhabited drawing rooms, not living rooms...
...Who, then, will chronicle this generation for literary posterity...
...He inhabited not the lowlife, but the highlife...
...It is about everything pencil-necked iiwestment bankers fear and loathe: drugs, Mohawks, downtown New York...
...Or is it a tale too terrible to be told...
...Clean" of contemporary literature, because his writing contained "no smells, no grime, no crummy sex...
...The narrator, one discovers early on in the story, is otherwise occupied...
...Even Auchincloss's newly found liberal sensibility (he votes Democrat now) seems oddly out of synch with the times...
...Auchincloss's Tales of Manhattan called him the "Mr...
...Twenty years ago Auchincloss's novels must have come as something of a breath of fresh air amid what many reviewers regarded as the fetid literary atmosphere of the day...
...But Auchincloss, as always, is worried about his characters' moral, not physical, endowments...
...Jay Mclnerney's Bright Lights, Big City has been touted as the Great Yuppie Novel...
...That was in 1967...
...It is the world Auchincloss—veteran club man and for thirty years a partner on the Street—knows best...
...Service flees Hoyt, Welles & Andrew with a few trusted henchmen and sets himself up as a founding partner of a new firm, a "sharp cutting weapon" with which he hopes to bleed the competition...
...His fiction did not eulogize unclean highway heroes or detail the passions of sniveling transvestites in Brooklyn...
...Unfortunately, mirth is a trait Auchincloss's fiction is not long on...
...A reviewer of Mr...
...Are we to believe that the lifestyles of today's rich and famous do not include a few private moments with Pat Sajak, or Alistair Cooke...
...with ethical, not sexual, prowess...
...I was a dedicated conservative," he said in a recent interview...
...Auchincloss has written with grace and ease (in The Rector of Justin) of New York society in the 1890s...
...The Embezzler, this new novel is a tale of greed and glory on Wall Street...
...While other novelists panted after the sordid pleasures of drugs, sex, and violence, Auchincloss carefully traced figures in the carpet, spinning Jamesian yarns in tasteful, decorous prose...
...One wonders if this conversion took place at his Wall Street office, his Park Avenue apartment, or his summer retreat in Bedford...
...Such niceties are all hypocritical posh to Robert Service, who wants to get on with the business of getting ahead in life and will stop only just short of the law to do so...
...Consider the novel's opening lines: "I have been working such long hours on this last corporate takeover that I have hardly made an entry in my journal for six weeks...
...One naturally assumes, therefore, that when a venerable gentleman of letters such as Louis Auchincloss combines the words "yuppie" and "diary" in the title of this, his latest novel, it is with mirthful intent...
...Little has changed...
...And his leading man, Robert Service, is not completely without a conscience...
...Robert Service, the diarist of the book's title, is a brash, ambitious baby boomer, stuck in an "old guard" firm where prep school ethics still guide business decisions and where clients are still fleeced the old-fashioned way—on golf courses...
...I guess you have to have been born after World War II to be a real skunk," Robert Service remarks early on in the novel...
...The windy denouement swells with talk of the metaphysics of mergers and of Faustian bargains with a devil who nowadays sports pin-stripes and tasseled loafers...
Vol. 19 • November 1986 • No. 11
