BOOK REVIEW : Mature Voices Explore Manners, Mores : THREE LIVES by Louis Auchincloss ; Houghton Mifflin; $21.95; 213 pages

Though only one of these novellas seems intentionally historical, all three are related by exceedingly elderly narrators and share a formal deliberateness of diction that emphasizes the lapse between the events recounted and our current casual speech patterns.

“The Epicurean” begins his chronicle by announcing that he’s “Six years older than our century, having been born in 1894,” making him a remarkably vigorous and articulate 98. Since that seems somewhat to be embarking upon an autobiography, it’s safe to assume that this particular novella is not Auchincloss’ most recent, though it is indisputably quintessential Auchincloss, exploring the manners and mores of New Yorkers of impeccable lineage but flawed morality.

Auchincloss’ characters tend to be examples of what happens to the third generation of a successful entrepreneurial grandfather, and “The Epicurean” is no exception.

In this case, the founder of the dynasty was a sternly benevolent Scottish immigrant who built a modest ironworks into a horseshoe empire; the narrator’s father was an inflexible businessman who refused to admit that the automobile might have an adverse effect upon the family concern, and the narrator himself is a dilettante sportsman not in the least apologetic about having accomplished nothing much in life beyond bringing down a rogue elephant with one well-aimed shot.

Until he’s goaded by his mother’s admirer into volunteering for active duty in World War II at the age of 45, Nathaniel Chisholm has seemed content to be a scion, though his belated beau geste indicates that he has never been quite as frivolous nor quite as carefree as his pose suggests.

“The Realist” is a woman, the most junior of the narrators at 71, provoked into writing her memoirs by her militantly feminist daughter. The year here is 1966, a fact making some of the daughter’s fiery rhetoric a bit dated, though the mother has the timeless quality so typical of the author’s heroines.

She’s a philanthropist and a social arbiter, part of “a force which used to control a surprising number of urban institutions in its time”; essential duties for which the men of that era had neither the interest nor the inclination. Should I have studied law and slaved in a firm that would never have considered making me a partner? Or would I, as I did, have taken up the really very interesting opportunities which then existed for the wives of the men downtown?”

A spirited young woman who believed herself plain at a time when beauty (or great wealth) seemed to be a girl’s only negotiable asset, Alida Vermeule chooses college over finishing school and outspoken opinion instead of coy deference.

Courted by a rather wooden young attorney, she marries him despite serious misgivings, and then proceeds to become the most devoted and understanding of wives, the archetypal woman of her time. “Really,” she writes at the conclusion of her slight but edifying story, “there have been times in my life when I have almost disliked my own daughter.”

Though “The Realist” is technically a novella of manners, its brittle surface conceals an acute analysis of the gap separating the women who came of age before World War II and made the best of their marriages and their limited options, from their own children, who never learned the knack of compromise and doomed themselves to almost certain disappointment.

“The Stoic” begins in 1902; a year in which a man’s resume could still include service in the Civil War. The trouble with Les Dunbar is that he had not fought in it, but instead had left the South to work for a New York banker, rising quickly to the top of his chosen profession.

This blank in Dunbar’s life does not trouble young George Manville, who meets Dunbar in his parents’ parlor and immediately makes the financier his idol and mentor, a role Dunbar relishes in his own wintry way.

Dunbar, despite his remote demeanor, plays another crucial role in the Manville family as well, as the lover of George’s winsome mother.

Growing up in this curious atmosphere, a world so mannered and artificial that the Manville-Dunbar connection is never mentioned, George himself becomes an ascetic, settling for his own marriage of convenience; looking the other way when his wife eventually seeks affection elsewhere.

More richly textured and complex than the other stories, “The Stoic” is Auchincloss at his worldly best; probing beneath the tranquil gloss of the declining power elite to the turbulence below.