[The literary device of viewing a man through the use of multiple narrations] is, of course, an old one; and the use to which it is put—to show, that if one seeks to learn the truth about a dead man from his former intimates, what one will get is merely a series of distorted reflections in a Hall of Mirrors—is also old. But Mr Auchincloss uses it with freshness. Was Leitner a monster or was he a saint?…

A novelist technically more brilliant than Mr Auchincloss—[an Anthony] Burgess or a [John] Barth—would no doubt have varied the styles of the various narrations…. The reader is here obliged to accept a convention whereby each memoir might merit the description 'as told to' Louis Auchincloss.

If an aristocracy can be said to exist in the States, then Mr Auchincloss belongs to it; and his writing, like...