Happiness at Any Cost

Once again, the rich prove to be different from the rest of us.

ADAM THE KING

By Jeffrey Lewis

Other. 212 pp. $21.95

In the 1980s, Jeffrey Lewis concentrated on solid, working class cops as a writer and producer for "Hill Street Blues," but recently he's turned his attention to a silver-spooned cast of characters. His new book, Adam the King, completes a quartet of slim novels begun in 2004 with Meritocracy. The series is about a group of friends who, like the author, went to Yale and have enjoyed lives of success and money and just enough spiritual angst to make them rueful and sympathetic. The middle volumes sport less ironic titles -- The Conference of Birds (2005), Theme Song for an Old Show (2007) -- but they all explore noblesse oblige in the modern age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (a Princeton man) set the bar high for anyone who wants to luxuriate in the tragedy of excess wealth and shattered dreams. In his best novels and short stories, the language is so lovely that you don't mind or even notice how really silly the plots are, how insufferable the characters. Lewis can't match that poetic style, but his novels have an elegance of their own, sparked with wit and marinated in nostalgia.

Adam the King begins in the 1990s with a memory of "the wedding of the year" in Clement's Cove, Maine, a coastal town where wealthy families keep summer "cottages." A restless billionaire named Adam Bloch married Maisie Maclaren, whose family members were "as rich as kings." Adam's old friend Louie, who narrates all four of these novels, remembers that the reception tent was so big that trees had to be cut down. "The caviar was flown in, the lobsters were rushed from Stonington, the rolls were baked that morning in Paris. . . . [Adam] would have fixed the weather if he could, he would have sent planes to seed the sky or do whatever they could do."

But the greatest expression of Adam's unfettered devotion to Maisie is the extravagant house he built -- "Bloch's Folly" -- "so outsized for the cove, and in the old shingle style, with a copper roof and a turret from which to see the sea in many directions and a flagpole like the mast of a ship and its porch wrapping around and around as if once you were on it you would never get off it." Presented with this Down East palace, Maisie says that "it would be nice if it had a lap pool."

That casual comment, not meant to be unkind or deflating, set in motion a series of events that reduced the house to the empty, "burnt-out hulk" Louie sees at the end of chapter 1. In the engaging story that follows, we learn exactly how that tragedy came to Bloch's Folly and what happened to Bloch and his matrimonial bliss.

Billionaires who barge into pristine coastal towns, scar the landscape with mansions and bully the locals into submission are old news, of course. (For the most recent and hilarious version, read Roger Rosenblatt's Lapham Rising.) Lewis, who divides his time between Los Angeles and Castine, Maine, has surely seen his share of such intrusions, but his Adam Bloch is the consummate gentleman, the sort of character who could tempt you to think billionaires might not be so bad after all. He's modest, a little embarrassed about his wealth, determined not to confirm any local anti-Semite's impression of how a rich Jew behaves. "What he wanted was is to be accepted here," Lewis writes. At all costs he refuses to look like "someone who was coming in and throwing his weight around, or someone who was disrupting the way life was."

The key to Adam's search for redemption is an accident that took place more than 30 years ago in this town. "Bloch was the driver," the narrator remembers, "when Maisie's sister Sascha died in a crash." Consumed by guilt and remorse for so many years, he's finally found happiness with the most unlikely person. "It was as if all his adult life, every moment he wasn't making money, Bloch had been quietly searching, in the same way other men search for a fountain of youth, for the antidote to tragedy."

The thrill of that discovery, though, makes Adam particularly anxious about doing everything exactly right. He's determined "to keep life in a proportion he could recognize," but he's also determined to do anything to please Maisie, and so when she mentions a lap pool, he immediately begins plans to add one. Since his house is built on a ledge, he needs the little plot of ground nearby owned by a kind woman who cleans houses and has kept her trailer on that spot for years.

The complications that develop -- all the way to the fiery climax -- are not what you expect. Lewis is a master of the subtle interplay of coincidence and character, the light tripping of events that lead to a disaster that seems at once inevitable and yet shocking. And he chronicles Adam's burdened spirit with such insight that you can't help but be moved no matter what your tax bracket. He also has a good ear for the patter at the general store, the background commentary that helps us understand the history of these Mainers and their conflicted attitude about the gilded newcomers who have revived and altered the local economy so dramatically. He doesn't condescend to the locals' ir homespun banter or romanticize their flinty wisdom.

What doesn't work at all, unfortunately, are Louie's few intrusions into the story he's narrating. For much of the novel, he remains so invisible that you forget he's there; when he reappears, it's like catching a glimpse of the cameraman's thumb. Readers who have read the previous three novels don't get nearly enough to bring his personal story to a satisfying close. And anyone who picks up this novel on its own will find Louie's intrusions merely baffling and, worse, precious -- particularly his last-minute attempts to make some profound connection between himself and Bloch: "Bloch looked a bit like my soul," he says. "He became the version of me I was most afraid to tell myself."

Fortunately, there aren't many of these passages, and they can't ruin this moving story about a lucky man who just wanted love and thought, briefly, that he'd found it. ·

Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World. He can be reached at charlesr@washpost.com.