Enjoyable novel/biography of a pre & post WWII respected man of letters, so to say, as told by his protege along with other important people in his life, both supportive and otherwise, as material is gathered toward an eventual posthumous biography by the protege as Felix Leitner slowly begins to fail in a nursing home. The various perspectives from friends, ex-wives, business partners and the like paint a fascinating look at a man who was unafraid to search and speak the 'truth', sometimes at great cost. As always, I love Auchincloss's style and his ability to create such vivid character studies with words......an action adventure novel it is not, but i never wanted to stop reading, the ultimate compliment, in my opinion. This is my 18th Auchincloss(!), and i will continue to slowly insert the remaining volumes of his fiction in my reading queue to make them last! ( )

Louis Auchincloss was the author of more than thirty novels, many short stories, and non-fiction books. Some of his novels, notably The Rector of Justin, are literary portraits of interesting men. The House of the Prophet is in this category as he portrays the life of Felix Leitner, a columnist/sage very much like Walter Lippmann. The story is told through dovetailing narrative fragments by Leitner himself, his two ex-wives, his stepdaughter, one friend, one colleague, and Leitner's longtime assistant Roger Cutter (a would-be biographer who's gathering all this material while 84-year-old Leitner nears death in a nursing home in 1974). Manhattan-born, half-Jewish Felix grows up smart but cold, self-righteously spurning his slum-landlord father, cultivating social contacts at Yale, marrying well-born but radical Frances, but always carefully preserving his sense of self: "I intend to select the association I want and join the clubs I want and live the life I want, regardless of what labels and motives small people may attach to my acts." He clerks at the Supreme Court, writes a small book on war-and-peace, and goes to Versailles as a Peace Commission staffer. However he is disillusioned: "I had believed passionately in man and his ability to create a good life on this planet. . . now I had awakened to a realm of horror, a dark sewer where black grubby pieces of insect life dug in and out of the mud and slime to eat each other."
So Felix's moral rigor thereafter is colored with cynicism and he is unable to settle into life --bouncing from one project to another with no satisfaction at work or at home. And finally, after Felix dies (having penned some senile, unpublished pro-Nixon Watergate columns), biographer Roger--a eunuch who has lived vicariously through Felix--is faced with a double-edged portrait: "Did he care more for truth or for the fame he derived in perceiving it? Did he love mankind or mankind as personified in Felix Leitner?" As always with Auchincloss the novel is readable, generally skillful, often engaging; an enjoyable literary excursion. ( )