cover image Carriage Trade

Carriage Trade

Stephen Birmingham. Bantam Books, $21.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-553-08135-0

Birmingham ( Our Crowd ; America's Secret Aristocracy ) may have spent much of his career chronicling the mores of the elite, but his rich are different from you and me chiefly in that no one could mistake them for anything but characters in a potboiler. Here, he starts out viably enough, reporting the death of Sy Tarkington, the super-wealthy founder of a legendary New York store that serves the so-called carriage trade. We learn that the circumstances surrounding Sy's death are mighty questionable; that Sy's idiosyncratic accounting practices may have been a screen for near-bankruptcy; that Sy was cheating on his stalwart, blue-blooded wife with the store's dashing jewelry buyer; that his life prior to founding the store is a complete mystery even to his own children; that he has ties to the underworld; and so on. The effort of juggling all these chestnuts exhausts Birmingham. While he can handle some of them with dexterity (Sy's emporium is an especially well-conceived arena), he frequently surrenders to soap-opera stereotypes and stock dialogue, or resolves plotting problems with lots of coincidences. By the time he orchestrates a finale, however, his vigor has deserted him altogether and he wraps up loose ends (even important ones, such as who killed Sy Tarkington) without so much as a gesture at believability. (Aug.)