Fiction December 7, 2010

Early in A Voice from Old New York, a posthumous memoir by Louis Auchincloss, who died last January, the author relates, in typically breezy manner, an anecdote about “my richest friend and contemporary, Marshall Field IV.” The Chicago newspaperman’s death in 1965, from a drug overdose, was the result of Field’s “tragic inheritance,” writes Auchincloss. He’s not referring to the hand-me-down wealth and privilege that so often hollow out great families, but to the “nervous troubles” that plagued Field’s father and presumably led his grandfather to suicide. “The story of the Fields is like that of the House of Atreus,”