In this novel by the author of The Golden Calves set in 1930s high society, a young man recounts the people in his life and what he's learned from them.
This superb gallery of portraits gathers its wit and resonance from the discerning eye of the central narrator, Dan Ruggles, who in the course of unraveling the dreams, doubts, and loyalties of those around him inevitably reveals his own.
Dan spends his boyhood in the company of old-money aunts from Bar Harbor and polo-playing uncles from Argentina. He stumbles upon the complexities of adulthood at Yale in the 1930s, and grows to worldly maturity at the Wall Street law firm that provides him not only with a vocation, but with seemingly endless material for his fiction. Fellow passengers are the people in his life, each one a story and each one a lesson. Only Auchincloss can ferret out with such precision and understanding the secrets, foibles, and ironies that lie just beneath the proper Establishment surface. This is Louis Auchincloss at the top of his form, a book to please his many admirers and delightful introduction for new readers as well.
