Customer Reviews

Diary of a Yuppie

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...this was my first Auchincloss book which I had chanced upon in the stacks in the late 1980s at the B&N on 14th Street. A true window into the personal lives of people that have "squatters rights" to Manhattan: old money New Yorkers. Auchincloss (as opposed to Jay McInerney) is inspired by Henry James, Edith Wharton - Great Authors who also inspire (some of) my own writing...thanks Louis - Im one of your biggest fans! I may never enter your realm of mastery but your work's influence is evident in my style...and no, I was never "tapped for Bulldog" at Yale....

Louis Auchincloss was well into his 60s when the downside of 1980s Wall Street "yuppie" culture began to show itself. With his decades of experience in chronicling the fictional social lives of Upper East Side old money and Manhattan lawyers, he was well-poised to take on the new beast that emerged from the M&A firms and law offices of lower Manhattan. He was particularly able to see it as a radical break from the more genteel and hierarchical culture of which he was a part.

This ability to distance himself from the yuppie culture itself while closely observing it allows him to dissect the mindset of the nearly sociopathic narcissism of that time with a surgical precision that is not found in other "yuppie chronicles" such as Bright Lights, Big City or American Psycho.

The story is essentially about the small group of men and women located primarily on the island of Manhattan who disassembled America in the 1980s solely for their own benefit. The main character, the immaculately named Bob Service, is a thinking man's version of Bret Ellis' Patrick Bateman who substitutes social viciousness for Bateman's physical violence.

Written as a first person narrative, a typical passage reads:

"When Alice and I enter a cocktail party, we tend to give the impression of a fine young American couple who will probably go the top of their ladders, or fairly high up anyway, and who will grace those ladders in doing so. "What a fine pair!" people explain. We are both of a good size, well made, with little fat; Alice has rich dark hair, a squarish face, perfect skin, and her eyes, wide apart, bear an expression that combines, charmingly, a warm sincerity with a faint, pleased surprise that she is so continually being confronted with such wonderful things. And I, of course, as I have so often confided to these pages, am the all-American kid...The great difference between us is that Alice supposes that the impression we give bears some relation to the actuality. I know that it is just an act, like other people's acts. That does not necessarily make it sinister. Are other people sinister?"

This obliviousness combined with narcissism haunts Bob Service throughout the story as it haunted Wall Street throughout the 80s.

For someone who is looking understand the essence of those times through fiction, it really doesn't get much better than this novel.

"Diary of a Yuppie" purports to be two things - and fails to achieve a sense of either. In no particular order, it claims to be a diary - a journal of daily goings on, both mundane and monumental, but all pretty much exhibiting the narrator's consignment to the prison of the here and now. Bereft of any foreshadowing, a true journal has no apparent sense of the was and would be. But author Louis Auchincloss never gives his unappealing protagonist the sense of being the center of his universe and living only for the moment. Instead, the hero is constantly pronouncing - it was not to be, or that plans were not going to work out. Worse, the protagonist is not even the central moral authority - that role goes to the hero's wife, constantly exposing the hero's shallowness. It's hard to believe that the central charachter is so self-centered when he yields the central role of his own story to another. Being that the self-centered hero isn't self-centered enough to own his own book, it's hard to visualize him as a yuppie - one of those trend-hungry, status-seeking urban denizens rendered extinct in the late-1980's. All charachters in "Diary" seem too "old-money", too entrenched in the old order that true Yuppies committed themselves to destroying. Auchincloss' yuppie is the last guy in the world you'd see lighting up - let alone inhaling. The hero's cultural background is too old-fashioned for those homo-sapiens who brought CD's to the market and fought the stigmas of multiple bankruptcy or early retirement. Even the idea of a journal seems closer to the self-absorbed slacker 1990's than the yuppie's that Auchincloss wants to portray. As a poorly conceived depiction of Yuppie-dom, "Diary" fails to satisfy, with the hero's moral dilemmas involving less of the hero than his reaction to the sufferings of others - abandones law partners, ex-wives, colleagues and relatives. This is the novel where the hero's greatest challenege is whether to stick with the upper-crust lawfirm that had nurtured him from law school. Pack it in your Beamer and forget about it.