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Well, when I was twenty-five I’d decided to write a novel in the first person, in which I would affect the air of an autistic snob and fool myself and the reader into thinking that I came from a good family and had suffered only from affluent neglect. Maybe it was supposed to be an affectionate car…

I reflected on the fact that Tiffany lamps would never again be appealing; they had ruined themselves for all time, these aberrant lamps, like Belle Epoque paintings and tapered Coca-Cola bottles and ballet dancers by Degas and handblown Murano glass figurines and those Toulouse-Lautrec absinthe bo…

My mother had not been invited to the memorial service, which concluded with a family dinner at Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. We sat in a private back room, in neckties and in silence, the latter awkward but expressly desired by my stepmother, and disturbed only by the bevy of liveried waiters who annou…

Why did my father always buy houses in such places, hoping for some connection to a society that would never otherwise have welcomed him? I was fond of recalling that château on Lake Geneva in which he died, a somewhat abashed variation on the Rothschilds’ Château de Pregny. I could picture the fad…