"Empty Mansions," About the Heiress Huguette Clark The story of how the book "Empty Mansions" came to be, in the words of Bill Dedman, one of its two authors, begins with "an exercise in American aspiration." And when Mr. Dedman, a journalist, embarked on that exercise, he could not have guessed how right that phrase would be. In 2009 he and his wife were looking for a house outside New York City. Just for fun, Mr. Dedman Googled real estate listings in the astronomical range. He found a markdown in New Canaan, Conn., a house that had gone from $35 million to $24 million and had one very unusual feature, even more unusual than its room for drying draperies. The place had been unoccupied since it was purchased. Mr. Dedman located the house and coaxed forth its caretaker. This man had never met his employer of more than 20 years, Huguette Clark. But he had a newspaper clipping about the sale at auction of a $23.5 million Renoir painting that came from "the estate of Huguette Clark." The caretaker was puzzled. Had Ms. Clark been dead all these years he worked for her? Mr. Dedman had stumbled onto an amazing story of profligate wealth, one so wild that "American aspiration" doesn't begin to describe its excesses. Ms. Clark was not dead at all, but she did not live in any of her immense dwellings, which included an estate atop a mesa in Santa Barbara, Calif., and three apartments, totaling more than 40 rooms, in a grand Fifth Avenue building. At 103, and in need of not much more medication than vitamin pills, she had long ago sequestered herself in a hospital room and had not been to any of her homes in more than 20 years. "Empty Mansions" is the self-explanatory title of the Huguette Clark story. This book credits Paul Clark Newell Jr., a cousin to Ms. Clark, as its co-author. Unlike many other Clark family members, he knew Huguette, who died in 2011 at 104, well enough to receive occasional phone calls from her, though she was too wily to give him her number. She was polite, lucid and even chatty, all of which undermine the idea that she was a crazy recluse living in miserable isolation. Far from it: her favorite late-18th-century French fable described the benefits of living unobtrusively as a cricket, rather than glamorously as a butterfly. She seems simply to have preferred to live quietly in tightly controlled surroundings, after spending her childhood and young adulthood as a jewel-bedecked heiress to a vast copper fortune. A more reckless and sensationalized book than "Empty Mansions" would try to pigeonhole Ms. Clark as a poor little rich girl with a bad case of arrested development. (She loved the Smurfs and the Flintstones. She also took a serious interest in dolls, and commissioned the House of Dior to create doll clothes.) A more lurid account would also salivate over the conflicting claims to her estate. And authors less open-minded than these would draw easy comparisons between Ms. Clark's later years and those of Howard Hughes. But she was a generous woman with many long-distance friendships; she just liked to keep them that way. The authors invoke "To Kill a Mockingbird": they call her "a modern-day "Boo" Radley, shut up inside by choice, safe from a world that can hurt." The early parts of this book tell an outsized tale of rags-to-riches prosperity, describing the ambition and ingenuity of W. A. Clark, the copper-mine millionaire and politician whose biography has tended to get lost in robber baron lore. But Clark was wealthy enough to be known as the Copper King, and one of the less notable things he did was to help create a railroad linking Salt Lake City with Los Angeles. He sold residential lots at a spot in Nevada that could be useful for railroad maintenance and refueling. The small town he created became Las Vegas. Clark married twice and had children by both wives. Ms. Clark was the younger of two daughters from his second marriage. By the time she was born, in 1906, her father was in his 60s, had become a United States senator from Montana despite a scandal involving his efforts to buy votes, and remained a study in extravagance. The now-vanished Clark homestead in New York City can be seen on the book's cover, complete with gaudy turret.