David Cleveland may be the most interesting as well as the most unfashionable novelist working in the United States. His latest, Gods of Deception, is a sympathetic investigation of an elite WASP family whose intellectual and political interests are firmly grounded in the world of what was once called high culture. His sentences are intricately fashioned, alternating finely observed descriptions of complex works of art with portrayals of natural landscapes that reflect his deep familiarity with the geology, botany, and geography of the Hudson River Valley. When his elite and privileged characters make small talk, they make a lot of it. They discuss subjects such as astrophysics, Freudian psychology, Marxism, and art history with real expertise and depth. Radiating Proustian intricacy, Jamesian subtlety, a Whartonesque focus on upper-class mores, and Auchinclossian attention to the finer points of the professional life of the successful WASP, Gods of Deception commits every conceivable