"And just what is a journal? A novel with the narrator, 'I'? Henry James disapproved of these; he said that they limited the tale to what the narrator could observe. The greater drama, according to him, was to see the observer observing." Auchincloss clearly has literary wisdom- and a keen reader can learn a lot through his passive morals and casual story telling.A favorite "passive moral" , quoted straight from the Ethelinda character, "In the great world, you must learn, there is no difference between work and play." I put these words height on the pedestool; 40 hours/week is a huge investment of time. You better play during work, and work during play. Bob Service clearly does neither of these things and suffers.I did not, however, give five stars for two reasons. The first being that the dialogue seemed forced and unnatural. Not necessarily the vocabulary, but the sentence structure seemed awkward to me. The second reason is almost all the characters were specialized in writing and literature trades. An English teacher is acceptable- but his parents, wife, father-in-law, friends, co-workers, ect. all seemed to be poets and English majors. I wished that Auchincloss branched out of his comfort zone in regards to his character's occupations.As arrogant as Bob Service was, he had some great one liners worth highlighting. I dog-eared page 44, where Bob is reflecting at a co-worker's dinner party, "We always start by talking shop at these parties, but after a few drinks we get on to personalities, and that is when I learn things. And why not learn things? What kind of sot would want to spend his whole life in a pit before a lighted stage and never go behind the scenes?" After reading that line, I wanted to go behind the scenes of Louis Auchincloss' brain.
