Diary of a Yuppie by Louis Auchincloss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Suicide Generation

Much better social commentary than literature, Auchincloss’s Diary of a Yuppie, marks an inflexion point in American culture, a very specific period when the idea of duty gave way without a fight to the necessity of ambition. The transition took place precisely when my generation of baby-boomers took control of the world. Once duty had been dumped, ambition has been biting itself in the backside on a recurrent schedule. As one of Auchincloss’s characters puts it, “You have to be born after WWII to be a real skunk.”

Auchincloss’s literary career was largely devoted to documenting how my generation took over from his and how we achieved a transformation which may just be suicidal. The only rule of the age of ambition is “break the rules, pay the penalty, and get back in the game.”

We were educated on someone else’s dime. We found employment easily and progressed just as easily in the corporate hierarchy. We shared with our hippie cohorts the overwhelming desire to escape from “infinite middle-classitude.”

We were the new meritocracy. Those without sufficient ambition, or ability, weren’t our concern. The world was changing; we were the ones destined to change it. We had a duty to ourselves, our families, our countries to succeed. Being the best meant doing what had to be done no matter how distasteful or personally corrupting.

Diary’s protagonist, Robert Service (the irony is clearly intentional), is an upper middle-class New York corporate lawyer. Auchincloss could write authoritatively about such men because he was one of them. But Service is also “representative of a generation” both as an example of the transition taking place and as a motive force in its execution.

Service is educated but banal. He can cite the classics but they have no meaning except as grease to social wheels. He is the embodiment of the social philosophy of Ayn Rand, the civil religion of the Prosperity Gospel, the spiritual narcissism of Erhard Seminar Training and the thinly veiled racism of late twentieth century Republicanism.

Forty years later it is possible to see where this Ambitious Everyman was headed: the North Korean missile crisis and the Appalachian opioid crisis; the racism of ISIS and the racism of Ferguson; treasonous Nixon becoming the treasonous Trump. We have systematically created a more horrible world than the one we inherited through our mindless ambition.

My grandson, an English Public School boy, was asked several years ago what he wanted to be when he grew up. Without hesitation he responded “Retired.” I felt elation at the implication that he has seen the real cause of our distress, that arrogant presumption of virtue which we call ambition. I interpret him as hoping for ethical survival as a possible alternative.

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