The Dark Lady by Louis Auchincloss in The Book Book

The best part of this author is learning how to spell his name. I sincerely hope I will be able to add Auchincloss to Khrushchev and license and separate on my list of words I know how to spell.

Auchincloss is related to Jackie Kennedy and Gore Vidal. He lived from 1917 to 2010. He spent four years in the Navy during WWII and he worked as an attorney for most of his life. During that time he wrote 31 novels and 18 non-fiction books.

The Dark Lady was one of his earlier novels. It's set in 1938 in New York, the story of a circle of people, featuring a not terribly successful actress who marries a very wealthy older man. She has to take him away from his wife first. She is aided in this enterprise by another woman who is a social hanger on, from a good family but without money. She has learned to make herself valuable to people who can do her favors.

It's a much better book than it sounds. Let me give you a quote: 'belonging to a generation of New York ladies who did nothing with their hands or bodies - no cooking, cleaning or even sewing - and whose minds, like high white corridors, seemed too lofty and clean for ideas.'

Wiki quotes Gore Vidal's description of Auchincloss - (don't I do that well?): "Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs.... Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives."

I guess I can add him to the authors I look for in used book stores.