THE LAST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

Stately, low-key fiction from the well-known management guru: loosely connected vignettes (Drucker compares them to the movements of a quartet) from the lives of four distinguished Europeans who reach their later years around the turn-of-the-century. First there's Prince Sobieski, Austria's ambassador to England in 1906, who has just received a letter in which natural daughter Henrietta (the only person he really loves) begs the Prince to aid her husband's military career. The Prince can't disappoint her—but he can't behave unethically either. So before he comes to a compromise solution, he must review his life: mistresses; young cousin/wife Margit, who never minded the Prince's philandering (she even set him up with her dearest friend); the acquisition of great paintings; the building of a financial empire (thanks partly to training from the family estate's Jewish manager); and his avuncular concern over Margit's latest affair. Then the focus shifts to British mega-banker McGregor Hinton, who also faces an ethical crisis and reviews his life: his poor beginnings; his Drucker-esque education in math/philosophy; his noble secret marriage to a mulatto prostitute after she bore his deformed child (she's now dying of cancer); his brushes with aristocracy, J. P. Morgan, and Sandor Ferenczi (they discuss the Oedipus Complex); his London/Vienna banking coup and "entrepreneurial" vision; and, now, his decision to resign and tackle the 18th-century mathematicians. Next: Austrian Jewish banker Julius von Mosenthal, who's planning a major restructuring of the Bank of London & Austria; while brooding on the upcoming meeting with partners Hinton and Sobieski, he recalls his long-ago cockney mistress Shells, planning a reunion. (The resignation plans of Hinton and Sobieski will coincide perfectly with Julius' patriotic scheme.) And, finally, to balance all that finance with some culture, there's the life of Baroness Rafaela Wald-Reifnitz—descended from the purest Sephardic Jews, painted by two great artists, devoted to music, in love (despite rough times along the way) with problematic husband Arthur. Drueker doesn't really succeed in building a satisfactory chamber-piece from these separate, somewhat repetitious life-studies; the final section, in fact, doesn't work at all as a coda. And the interior-monologue style here becomes awfully dry and stilted, with page after page of "he mused" and "he thought" and "he continued to himself." Still: these are elegant people elegantly pondering diplomacy, etiquette, finance, adultery, anti-Semitism, history, old age, and the approaching Great War—and readers partial to a sedate, old-world sensibility will be richly rewarded.