A main theme of [The House of the Prophet] is the contrast between Leitner's happy relationship with his public and his often difficult relationships with those close to him. The title does not in fact refer to a person or a place of vatic perception but to the verse in Matthew 13:57 that says that prophets are not honored in their own houses.

The House of the Prophet reflects Auchincloss' long established strengths. The conversations are informed and adroit, the narrative tone is literate, eloquent, ironic but with a continuous undertone of seriousness. It is written with the author's enthusiastic interest in the daily conflicts and personalities of the world of influential people that he has always lived in. Its subject is also entirely believable; the portrait of Leitner is convincing as what such a man would have to be like in personal life. But this fact also has to do with what seems wrong in this smoothly crafted study.

The House of the Prophet harks back in many ways to The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss' portrait of a headmaster of a New England boarding school who was modeled partly on Endicott Peabody, the famous master of Groton…. In The House of the Prophet Auchincloss has not been able to deal with a fact that he is too much of a realist to deny, which is that the personal lives of most writers—especially political writers—are simply not very interesting. Their work is the drama of their lives and tends to absorb their egos. Aside from a single incident …, Leitner is shown as continually moving toward his own search for truth, away from people—and also away from further self-revelation. In a similar case, a biographer can refer to an author's works, which often form a chronicle of his or her personality in time. But since Leitner is essentially a fictional character …, there is no work to point to. We are left at the end with seemingly empty debate as to whether Leitner was a monster or a saint in his single-minded pursuit of the truth. What was the truth that he pursued?

All the same, it should be said that the exploration of character is something special in Auchincloss' novels. In it he often continues a pattern familiar in English and American fiction of the past, in which a morally conscious and ironically perceptive observer, who is usually in some sense passive, comes slowly to know another person who is important to his or her destiny and is changed by this knowledge…. [Today this pattern] offers a view of the human ego in a moral light and an appraisal of knowing innocence which are available only in such authors as Auchincloss, C. P. Snow, and Anthony Powell, who still write in the tradition of the novel of manners. The House of the Prophet conforms closely to this pattern…. But for the reasons given, this novel may not be the best to begin with to appreciate this aspect of Auchincloss' work. The Rector of Justin would probably be a better choice or one of those novels in which the illumination of character is more implicit, such as Portrait in Brownstone or The Great World and Timothy Colt. (pp. 13, 23)