Her Infinite Variety

From one of America''s greatest men of letters our sublime master of manners comes hisnovel Her Infinite Variety. Louis Auchincloss has been called our most astute observer of moral paradox among the affluent (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.) and his fiction described as that which has always examined what makes life worth living (Washington Post Book World). Now he brings us the rollicking tale of an unforgettable woman of mid-twentieth century America: the devilish forever plotting yet wholly beguiling Clara Hoyt.. A romantic early in life Clara gets engagedmuch to her mother''s horrorto the lackluster Bobbie Lester. Soon after her Vassar graduation however Clara sees the error of her ways spurns Bobbie and slyly enthralls the well-bred and fabulously wealthy Trevor Hoyt the first of her husbands. Soon she lands a job at a tony magazine and so begins her wildly entertaining course to the inner sanctum of New York''s aristocracy and into the boardrooms of the publishing world.. In a world where women still had to wield the weapons of allure and charm above all else to secure positions of power Clara one of the last of her kind succeeds marvelously. Auchincloss gives us in Clara an irresistible Cleopatra lovely wily and mercurial. As Shakespeare wrote of that feminine creation Age cannot wither her nor custom stale / Her infinite variety.