The Comfort Letter

Ordway Smith is the son of a rich Philadelphia lawyer and Charlie Conroy is the son of the family's gardener. As grown-ups, though, Charlie is a hyperkinetic takeover artist rolling up businesses so fast that neither his finances nor his financers can keep up. Ordway, he decides, is just the lawyer for a crucial bond offering to prop up his financial house of cards.To whom and what does an attorney owe loyalty? How far must he go to represent a client? Ordway will face these excruciating challenges in 1969 against a backdrop of money troubles, sexual temptation, marital disappointment, and a war in Vietnam that threatens to exile his son. Arthur R. G. Solmssen (1928-2018) was a prominent Philadelphia lawyer whose five novels won favor from critics and readers alike. As is often the case in Solmssen's novels, there is a lost love uneasily re-encountered, and a perceptive focus on the tensions between Philadelphia's WASP elite and the talented Jews they embrace, fear and disdain. Solmssen himself knew both groups; a product of the Main Line, Harvard and Penn Law (like his protagonist Ordway Smith), his first language was German and his family came to America in flight from the Nazis. The Comfort Letter, like three other Solmssen novels, is set in the context of the fictional Philadelphia firm of Conyers & Dean, a legal analog of the ad agency at the center of Mad Men. Drinking, smoking and philandering are as common as suits and ties, and all the work is done on paper. It's a world the erudite author conjures vividly and even movingly thanks to his immersion in it, his great sensitivity, and a rather unexpected gift for handling passion on the page. His modus operandi was to bedevil his mid-century lawyers with agonizing moral choices. Their world has vanished, but the ethical and personal dilemmas endure, just like Arthur Solmssen's art. This new edition of The Comfort Letter, with an insightful foreword by Bloomberg's Matt Levine and a cover image by Fairfield Porter, marks the fiftieth anniversary of a thrilling novel of money and morals out of print for decades until now.