The Integrity of Love

...Most of the heroes in previous Auchincloss novels have been men who could neither conform nor change: victims—of their money, their traditions, their families and themselves...

...Means, Amos Levine and Reese's parents are sympathetically but sharply drawn...

...Granny Parmelee...

...and he has learned the novelist's most precious lesson, which is how to dramatize his subject...

...Every Auchincloss novel has memorable characters of the older generation: those salty dowagers and sad, resigned old men who, fortified by a tradition that was stronger in their day, hold their heads high in the face of change...

...He is willing to pay for his mistakes and, better still, to profit by them...

...Unlike the majority of Americans, they are members of a distinct class, a fact which makes life easier for those many who accept the advantages and overlook the limitations, but harder for those few who can accept neither...

...If the next Auchincloss novel is as good as this one, it will be safe to rank this writer, with his prime working years still before him, as the equal of Marquand or O'Hara...

...If it is true, as a recent critic claims, that American novelists have consistently avoided the theme of conjugal love...

...In order to avoid it, once he has become aware of its demands, he is forced to a ruthless and even cruel rebellion...

...But in this novel, he contrives, and most convincingly, to have his hero saved by love...

...Auchincloss knows it and so do his characters...

...In our day, Reese Parmelee and his wives have a choice of answers: too many choices, perhaps, for the depth of the question...

...Reviewed by Victor Chapin Author, "The Hill" "The Company of Players," "The Lotus Seat" Louis AUCHINCLOSS is a prolific novelist who could and should be popular and one who now must be taken seriously...

...The prodigal's return is almost a disaster...

...In this novel we are both convinced and satisfied when Reese's integrity finally yields to love...

...He has the courage of his own folly and the conviction of his own wrongheadedness...

...Most of the characters in an Auchincloss novel are chiefly concerned with or affected by three things: money, social tradition and the law...

...In it he has achieved a balance and perspective that gives his familiar material a new vigor and spontaneity, and, best of all, a broader sympathy...

...For the sake of a happy but logical ending, Auchincloss also gives us a heroine who, it seems, is able to do the same...

...Class is no longer of much importance in the world...

...Nor can he be charged with excessive preoccupation with a special class or profession...

...Reese Parmelee is forced to battle two wives for the sake of his integrity, while his two wives, separately and together, battle his integrity for the sake of their security...

...Pursuit of the Prodigal, his seventh novel, is his best...

...As a novelist he is concerned with the old order in a changing world, with vestigial mores and the inroads made upon leisure, wealth and family unity by the new assembly line society to which his characters have no choice but to adjust...

...He proves himself to be, in the eyes of almost everyone, a heel...

...He has always had style and a sure knowledge of his material...

...The saving difference between Esther, Reese's first wife, and Rosina, his second, is that Rosina, who almost suffers Esther's fate even to the extent of becoming just like her, recognizes, where Esther would not, that in every relationship there is a limit beyond which concession becomes defeat...

...They are, on the whole, intelligent people who wish to live in the modern world...

...Reese Parmelee discovers his integrity somewhat late in life...

...But here the older generation is depicted without the moral nostalgia characteristic of the other novels...

...Reese Parmelee is a less sympathetic type than his predecessors but, in the end, a more sympathetic hero...

...The question of how men fail women and women fail men will always be with us...

...Will he choose to explore the more extreme comic possibilities, or will he, as he tried to do in his last novel, Venus In Sparta, search for the more tragic implications...

...If readers of his earlier novels did not respond to them fully because they failed to identify with the problems of characters who are generally both rich and well born, they need have no fears about Pursuit of the Prodigal for by mastering his material, Auchincloss has transcended it...

...It seems to me Auchincloss has succeeded where he always failed before: He has made his women as interesting and authentic as his men and has given sufficient strength to their side of the argument...

...The proof of Auchincloss' success with this character is that the reader suspends judgment on him...

...good manners is another...

...Money, of course, is one of these...

...It is an old device but in our times seldom used successfully...

...This book is no exception...

...In the larger view, they are victims of a society (or at least of a class) that is moribund but still effective enough, for those who belong to it, to produce its share of victims...

...but being human, they are eager to keep what they can of the good things that have come down to them...

...No one who reads simply for pleasure could fail to enjoy this novel and anyone who considers himself a jealous guardian of the novel's tradition will be forced to admire it...

...Now that Auchincloss has perfected his formula, it will be interesting to see how he develops his future novels...

...However, Pursuit of the Prodigal has for its hero a man who refuses to be a victim...

...Now he has a great deal more than that, for he has discovered the individuals behind the types he chooses to write about...

...Louis Auchincloss cannot be included in the indictment...

...Auchincloss is adept at creating moral dilemmas with which to beset a man who values his integrity a bit more than his neighbor...

...The search leads him to another wife, a less respectable but more exciting law firm, and a crisis in which his old life and his new join forces against him...

...and we accept the promise that love, in turn, will yield to his integrity...

...He has consistently struggled with the subject and in this novel has come as close to conquering the unconquerable as any but the greatest novelists can...

...Auchincloss is a social novelist who, almost alone in this country, has tried to write in the grand manner of comedy...

...Reese deserts his wife and two children, a respectable law firm, and his own financial security in order to go in search of himself...

...It is his growing knowledge of these choices and of all the attendant factors—social, economic, psychological—as well as those to which no name can be conveniently given, that makes Louis Auchincloss the writer he is today...

...He has finished showing us wherein his people are different and is now occupied with the essentials that make them very like anyone else...