The publication of The Atonement and Other Stories, a collection
of twelve new interconnected tales by Louis Auchincloss, was
scheduled by Houghton Mifflin to coincide with his eightieth
birthday on September 27.[1]
This is indeed an occasion for celebration. For one
thing, the round age of eighty offers a natural
opportunity to reflect on an American literary career
that has spanned a half-century.
Since
the deaths of Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling—as
Jackson R. Bryer remarked some years ago in Louis
Auchincloss and His Critics (1979)— Auchincloss now
stands out as our most distinguished and versatile man
of letters. In addition, the new collection also shows
that, despite his advanced age, our greatest novelist
of manners is (in his command of plot and
characterization, and in the felicity of his narrative
style) still a master of the shorter form as well.

With respect to this new collection, there are too many
stories to discuss in detail, but some sense of the
volume is suggested by Auchincloss’s recurrent themes:
advancing age, moral retrospection, the decline of the
WASPs, and the desire to atone for past
ills and, toward the end, to set things straight. The
first tale, “The Atonement,” meditates on the fate of the
WASP conscience in a workplace and social world where
other religious, racial, and ethnic forces have come
into prominence. Of particular interest to me is
Auchincloss’s increasingly visible concern with how the
prep-school Christian moral vision shapes the young