Bankbooks & Backgrounds

THE HOUSE OF FIVE TALENTS (369 pp.) --Louis Auchincloss--Houghton Mifflin ($4.50).

Josiah Hoyt was a pompous, puffed-up railroad executive who managed to lose all his own money, much of his wife's considerable fortune, and sulked for two years before he finally died at the dinner table. He sat there cooling for quite a while before his wife noticed the difference.

The rest of the characters wheeled out in Author Auchincloss' filigreed tale of a family fortune are only slightly more alive than Josiah. A lawyer by profession, Auchincloss probes with exasperating precision through the backgrounds and bankbooks of the five-generation descendants of one Julius Millinder. a tough-minded merchant who just happened to put together a $100 million fortune after the Civil War. Nothing the author finds suggests that the Millinder clan is worth the trouble. After Julius, the stock began to go to seed. One granddaughter marries a French prince--but not for love. A grandson is cuckolded, a nephew turns embezzler, a granddaughter settles down with an English earl whose major talent is a firm grasp for ladies' behinds.

Seen through the eyes of Gussie Millinder, a humorless but perceptive old maid, the family's degeneration is pathetic. Mean little descriptions of poor Newport hostesses whose husbands had to make do with fortunes of only $1,000,000 give the neat, well-mannered prose an occasional touch of irony. But young debutantes who sugar their very small talk with references to Louis XI (not XIII or XIV), and butler who tell dinner guests when their hostes wants them to switch conversational part ners, all lend a persistent air of unreality almost as if the author were intent 01 parody.

Having kneaded the same sort of upper crust in four books before this one. Author Auchincloss seems unaware that his people are increasingly dull anachronisms. Hi; careful, courtly prose almost manages to confer dignity, but in the end his novel is like the great Newport mansions it recalls --elaborately ornamented in its facade too dry and dusty inside for a modern generation to bother about.

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