Gore Vidal once wrote that among American authors Louis Auchincloss is “the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs … things that we don’t know about people we don’t often meet in fiction.” Mr. Auchincloss has told us about these things in more than 60 books.

Like Mr. Vidal, also a prolific author, Mr. Auchincloss belongs to an alternative literary tradition, one in which the ready representation of a given milieu takes precedence over imaginative art. That is why the comparison between Mr. Auchincloss and Edith Wharton or Henry James always feels like a set-up. Though all three are novelists of manners, only Mr. Auchincloss devotes himself to recording — rather than using — the fabric of a certain society. For though he certainly admires and even emulates James and Wharton, he does not compete with them. The many references to James in Mr. Auchincloss’s own fiction are not galling, as they would be if they suggested thwarted ambition.

Mr. Auchincloss’s newest volume, a short story collection titled “The Friend of Women” (Houghton Mifflin, 212 pages, $24), offers a characteristic sampling of his society. “The Conversion of Fred Coates” explores the strain the McCarthy era puts on an old school male friendship, just as some of his past stories have looked at the strain of Vietnam on intergenerational male relationships. Mr. Auchincloss seldom ventures far beyond the postwar period. Critic James Tuttleton, after all, has noted that Mr. Auchincloss’s clan was deeply embarrassed when one of its own, Jacqueline Bouvier, “fell in with” the Kennedys.

The title story, “L’Ami des Femmes,” a reference to the play by Dumas fils, points up another aspect of Mr. Auchincloss’s debt to literary forebears like James. Just as Hubert Hazelton, the narrator of this story, justifies his friendships with women by holding up a long-ago play about a man who tries to keep women honest, so does Mr. Auchincloss hold up James’s dated moral seriousness. Hazelton, a veteran teacher of English at a Manhattan girls school, follows the lives of his former students with a judgmental interest. He knows he cuts an odd profile. “No doubt contemporary mores have left dumas fils and myself behind, as dead as the dodo.” Mr. Auchincloss knows his relation to be just as stubbornly anachronistic.

When one of his girls decides to marry a man for his money, the old teacher tells her that to do so would be “doing a wicked thing.” Characters in Mr. Auchincloss’s fiction call each other out with refreshing regularity. Their sense of mores, public and private, belongs to a class with a high sense of security; their confidence, even to remain naïve, distinguishes them from many characters in contemporary fiction. Yet their expostulations do not always favor the art of fiction; they often have a synthetic, argued quality: “My god Harry, was that necessary?” asks the narrator of another story. “A one-night stand when your wife’s away and you’ve reached a dangerous age is no reason to wreck a marriage.”

It would be unfair to criticize Mr. Auchincloss’s late work without looking sometimes at his earlier work, and the “The Devil and Rufus Lockwood” presents an opportunity. Like his most lauded novel, “The Rector of Justin” (1964), this story imagines a relationship between a priggish young teacher and a more complex, authoritative headmaster. The new story lifts elements from the older: Both headmasters emit “a command presence,” both emphasize moments of doubt with “a monumental shrug,” and both turn on their naïve disciples with an impatient allusion to Lewis Carroll: “I have answered three questions and that is enough. Be off or I’ll kick you downstairs!”

The difference between the old stories and the new is twofold. The first comes with the disappointment of repetition. The second is the simplification of perspective. In “The Rector of Justine,” the headmaster is described from multiple points of view, and much is left to the reader’s imagination. But in the new story, as in much of Mr. Auchincloss’s recent work, a single character explains his case in the first person, laying it out like a persuasive lawyer. When critics complain that Mr. Auchincloss suffers from his fluent virtuosity, it is perhaps such neatness of exposition that bothers them. But such exposition does the job: It furthers the replication of Mr. Auchincloss’s world into the present day.

blytal@nysun.com