Last of the Old Guard Book

The American master Louis Auchincloss offers an intimate look behind the closed doors of a prominent New York law firm.

Nearing the end of his days, Adrian Suydam, half the partnership of the law firm of Suydam & Saunders, reflects on his lifelong friendship and business relationship with Ernest Saunders, a tragic and complicated man incapable of properly loving anyone. In this perceptive novel, set against the backdrop of old New York, Auchincloss exposes the temptations and vicissitudes that thrust his characters toward unforeseen fates.

Drawing on his career as a wills-and-trusts attorney, Auchincloss elegantly brings to life a stratum of society that few have seen. Through interwoven tales of family members, clients, and such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and the Astors, readers get an insider’s look at a secretive world. Touching, comical, and erudite, Last of the Old Guard is both a revealing history of a high-profile law firm and an intimate portrait of a poignant friendship between two men.

Publishers Weekly

"Private papers left by the dead may present difficult problems for the survivor," Auchincloss writes in his latest chronicle of the WASP wealthy, and they do for Adrian Suydam, "an American gentleman of the old school," who sets about writing the biography of his deceased corporate law partner, Ernest Saunders. It's 1944, and grand old New York is in its full glory as Adrian digs into Ernest's past (and, by virtue of their close relationship, his own), touching on muffled scandals that could threaten "the old order of the wellborn and highly educated." The tone is cool and reserved as Adrian examines how Ernest's passionate devotion to the firm-founded in 1883-precludes him from finding true love and how his colleague foresees the loss of "the homogeneity, the esprit de corps, the intimacy" that "the changing conditions of modern law practice" presage. The law partners' friendship constitutes a classic fraternal love story, and Auchincloss, for all his narrative stuffiness, effortlessly conjures a bygone world of privilege. (Dec.)

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