Detachment on the Inside

THE EMBEZZLER by Louis Auchincloss. 277 pages. Houghfon Mifflin. $4.95.

Among authors who have written about the rich, from Thackeray to Fitzgerald, envy in the form of satire has often leaked onto the page. But Louis Auchincloss has no reason to envy the rich. He is a member of the club, an urbane, 48-year-old member of his elected fictional milieu--old families, old money and old schools. As do his other books, this tenth novel presents a balanced, unjudgmental insider's view of the world he knows. The Embezzler, in fact, is unjudgmental almost to a fault.

A man of impeccable connections and bloodlines, Guy Prime introduces his friend Rex Geer to the green world of finance. Rex's success in banking soon surpasses Guy's in stock brokerage; it sorely tests their friendship. When Guy needs $100,000 to cover an illegal market gamble, Rex gives it to him--and takes Guy's wife Angelica to bed. In the end, Guy's continued peculations cost him Rex's support, and he goes to prison. After divorcing Guy, Angelica moves in with Rex and his wife Lucy, and on Lucy's death becomes the second Mrs. Geer.

Author Auchincloss traverses this somewhat lurid ground with his customary cool style. A writer annealed by the disciplines of the law, which he still practices in Manhattan, he is incapable of setting an uncertain, unseemly or ungraceful foot. His narrative, his paragraphs and his sentences flow with smooth inevitability.

But the lawyer in Auchincloss forbears to pass judgment. Instead, he lets Guy Prime, Rex Geer and Angelica do it, in each of the book's three parts. Their testimony conflicts so widely, just as testimony does in courts, that the reader may end up wishing that the author had donned magistrate's robes and handed down a verdict.

In The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss' best novel, neutrality worked as a novelistic technique. There, numerous witnesses to the life of Headmaster Frank Prescott assembled a fascinating portrait of a man whose substance did not have to be judged to beguile. But it does not work in The Embezzler, partly because these are not very interesting people, mainly because Auchincloss' total detachment invites the same reaction from the reader. If the book makes any point, it is even more familiar than Auchincloss' gilt-edged landscapes are by now: that the only difference between rich people and poor people is money.

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