The Merry-Go-Round

In this sharp, astringent collection of essays, Van Vechten turns his critical eye on the American obsession with taste a disease that afflicts the wealthy no less than the aspiring. The centerpiece is a portrait of a mother awaiting her daughter Mildred's return, her delicate sensibilities surrounded by the suffocating opulence of carefully curated wealth. What unfolds is a quiet war between authenticity and performance, between the genuine self and the self we purchase through decorators and decorative ideals. Van Vechten dissects the American home as a theater of pretense, where every objets d'art signals status rather than soul. These essays, written at the turn of the century, anticipate the anxieties of a culture that would only become more consumed by aesthetics, more terrified of appearing inauthentic. For readers who relish the social criticism of Henry James or the satiric sensibility of Edith Wharton, this is a forgotten gem that reveals the deep American discomfort with honest taste and the exhausting labor of performing refinement.