THE NEW YORKERS by Hortense Calisher. 559 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.
This massive family chronicle begins impressively and then dissipates itself in authorish rhetoric and an obsessively circular kind of storytelling. In the end, the balance left to praise is slighter by the measure of Novelist Calisher's fondness for the supersubtle.
The New Yorkers of the title are the Mannixes, members of a dwindling clan of well-to-do Jews, and their carefully tolerant gentile connections. The story begins in the 1940s at a political dinner given in honor of Judge Simon Mannix, a shrewd, large-minded man...
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