[An American critic and biographer, Edel is a highly acclaimed authority on the life and work of Henry James. His five-volume biography Henry James (1953-73) is considered the definitive life and brought Edel critical praise for his research and interpretive skill. In the following review of Tales of Manhattan, Edel praises the skill, the "insights" and "delicate subtleties** of Auchincloss's stories, yet the reviewer also complains of a "certain thinness" in the author's work.]

Louis Auchincloss continues to tell his tales of Manhattan as an endless Arabian Nights entertainment. This is his fourth collection, and his earlier volumes, The Injustice Collectors, The Romantic Egoists, and Powers of Attorney, long ago demonstrated his ease and skill in the short story. It is perhaps his characteristic form: for his novels are also constructed on a short-story principle, as in The Embezzler, in which he told the same story from three different angles. In Tales of Manhattan he begins with five episodes told by an expert in an art auction firm; then he has four linked tales about (and by) the members of a law firm. He adds a final group called "The Matrons," in which we see various society women, both generous and predatory, in the social world of New York.

His skill, in spite of his rapid and abundant production, has grown. He has acquired great smoothness in spinning his stories, and his varnished situations are suffused with psychological truth and moral power. Readers of this volume will discover in it a fascinating tale about an art collector specializing in paintings of famous children who have met violent ends, like the little princes in the tower. With dramatic flair, the narrator reveals this man's constant turning to his own psychic "death" when he was young, his lost childhood. The same kind of subtle anecdote is told in "The Senior Partner's Ghosts," in which the partner, trying to write the life of his predecessor, discovers he can't get his words out without sounding like his subject. When he wants to set down eulogy, he records rascality. He is "possessed," as in the old medieval tales, and for all his high morality he has unwillingly embodied within himself all the venality and crookedness of his former chief.

In such tales Auchincloss combines with his narrative skills a documented knowledge of society; he knows it in depth and he has an uncommon grasp of the dynamics of power, social and financial. A whole phase of enterprise and psychological history is embodied in his tale of Louis Degener and Eric Temple, members of a law firm: Temple's recurrent rebellion and self-assertion against the rigidities and traditions of his class and profession, and Degener's constant discovery of the ideal compromise for him which advances the firm, satisfies the rebellion, and gives Temple more power. Degener in a sense becomes Temple's evil genius, taking the edge off his self-assertion yet making a pragmatic virtue of it. This is one of Auchincloss' ironic-moral tales, and it is matched by that of "The Money Juggler," a less finely written narrative, in which three socialite graduates of the Columbia Law School gossip about the money-and-success madness of one of their socially—and racially—"inferior" classmates. They describe his dizzy climb and fall with cool contempt, only to be reminded that each one of them aided and abetted the careerist in destroying the very values they pretend to cherish. This is Auchincloss' favorite theme.

The metaphor for the entire Auchinclossian society is to be found in his touching tale of "The Landmarker," in which a declining cookie pusher, Chauncey Lefferts, devoted to New York society and to the city's landmarks, begins to recognize in the disappearing city his own impending disappearance, "the very precariousness of surviving beauty, was analogous to his own threadbare elegance. What was he but a sober, four-story brownstone facade, with Gothic arches and an iron grille, such as one might find in Hicks Street or over at Brooklyn Heights." This story, like the others, has its further ironic twist, in Lefferts' final recognition that the very landmarks he loves are often destroyed by his own class, discarded as he has been socially discarded.

To reduce these tales to a brief sentence or two, however, does not suggest their insights and their delicate subtleties. Nevertheless, with a writer of such gifts, we ask ourselves why Auchincloss' work gives an impression of a certain thinness, of being in two dimensions. In part this may derive from the fact that he writes in the margin of his law practice; in part it may also come from his apparent need to produce a book a year, as he has done now for more than a decade. He might reply that this is what Anthony Trollope did, and perhaps we can find an answer in the example of that novelist. Trollope wrote his quota of words by the clock each morning before going to his job at the Post Office. However, he wrote as if he had all the time in the world to explore the society he knew so well; his characters have growth and development. With Auchincloss we are rushed along, in a kind of restless creation; the narrative leaves the reader—and the characters—little time for reflection and the sense of being in time and in space; we do not get a chance to live through the experience; it is over before we attain full awareness of it.

This is true of his novels as well as his tales. We never get a sense of "felt life." It is in this, I believe, that Auchincloss makes his compromise with excellence; this is the deeper flaw in his extraordinary virtuosity.