East Side Story: A Novel [Hardcover]

Louis Auchincloss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 2004

"Louis Auchincloss has an enveloping story to tell and a perfect, understated knowledge of those who inhabit it," said the New York Times of The Scarlet Letters. The same can be said of Auchincloss's new novel, a tour de force that charts the rise of one uncommon family in America's grand city.
How did the families who live on Manhattan's Upper East Side get to where they are today? As much a penetrating social history as it is engaging fiction, East Side Story tells of the Carnochans, a family whose Scottish forebears establish themselves in New York's textile business during the Civil War. From there they quickly move on to seize prominent positions in the country's top schools and Manhattan's elite firms. As the novel unfolds, family members across the generations recount their stories, illuminating lives steeped in both good fortune and moral jeopardy. From women who outsmart their foolish husbands, to ambitious lawyers who protect the Carnochan name, to the family's artists and writers, all weigh the question that infuses so much of Auchincloss's fiction: what makes for a meaningful life in a family that has so much?
In its starred review, Kirkus Reviews hails Auchincloss for being "once again the master of his craft." East Side Story is both a loving and wicked look at New York's own as only this sublime master of manners can provide.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Venerated author Auchincloss serves up solid tales but few surprises in his 60th novel of upper-crust New York life. When retired nurse Loulou Carnochan begins to compile the history of the Carnochan clan in the 1960s, she admits that she is "planning a species of novel with what was at best a collection of short stories," and indeed, the book has the feeling of a collection of family anecdotes. Scottish thread merchant David emigrated to the United States in the 1830s; Eliza, the wife of David's eldest son, secretly loves David's youngest, a Civil War hero; Bruce, a son of Eliza's, chooses security over romance in marriage; Gordon and David, two cousins of the succeeding generation, play out a dynamic of power and idealism that will be repeated in their sons' generation. Occasionally, every Carnochan seems to be hiding either a thwarted romanticism or an amoral cynicism under a layer of respectable Christian business sense. However, the author knows a thousand variations on his theme of social hypocrisy, and he's at his best when he allows his characters to complicate their two-dimensional roles; it is these moments that justify his reputation as a pre-eminent chronicler of American life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Auchincloss's sixtieth book is a novel of power and hypocrisy in upper-class New York that, like much of his previous fiction, focusses on the agonizing conflict between America's proudly Protestant face and its tawdry capitalist backside. The book consists of eleven linked portraits chronicling the rise of the fiercely Presbyterian Carnochan family, from Old World Scottish thread merchants in Colonial America to lawyers, bankers, and business tycoons in the modern era. The Carnochan men follow their forebears to Yale and, with a few exceptions, to worldly success. But, dedicated to little more than "their own permanence," they also expose the moral bankruptcy of their class. Auchincloss, who is eighty-seven, and himself something of a Gotham patrician, casts a chilly eye upon the American empire that families like the Carnochans helped to build.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; New title edition (December 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618452443
• ISBN-13: 978-0618452446
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #647,594 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "The Carnochans seemed dedicated to their own permanence.", November 22, 2004

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: East Side Story: A Novel (Hardcover)

In his fifty-ninth novel in fifty-seven years, Louis Auchincloss continues his thematic focus on the socially prominent families of New York and how they achieved their status. Beginning with David Carnochan, an immigrant from Scotland, a "good burgher with a sharp eye for a deal," who was "a granite pillar of respectability," Auchincloss traces the family through ten characters belonging to four generations, as they successively increase their fortunes and cement their places in the highest echelons of New York society.

The family's pragmatism is shown when Douglas Carnochan purchases a substitute during the Civil War, while his abolitionist brother Andrew fights, is wounded, and returns to the front. Douglas's wife Eliza imposes "standards in manners and morals" on the family, and son Bruce shows how marriages are negotiated when the family's fortunes begin to fail. The reader observes the vulnerability of the family's most idealistic members, as pressure is exerted on them to remember the interests of the family and its businesses as a whole and to ignore the sometimes unethical behavior of relatives.

With the characters' public and private moralities sometimes shown to be at odds, an individual family member's corporate interests often take precedence over what one would consider to be morally "right" behavior toward others. Even the family's penchant for attending the same elite schools is put under the microscope, as is the tendency to keep the wealth in the family by intermarrying with distant cousins. Showing that the family's contribution to the arts, to politics, to teaching, "to any occupation that involved giving out rather than taking in, was minimal," Auchincloss also shows that they are not enviable because of the opportunities that their wealth has given them, but sometimes to be pitied because of their limited outlooks and lack of connection to the outside (real) world.

Auchincloss wisely presents a genealogical diagram at the beginning of the novel, which resembles a series of interconnected short stories, each individual's personality being obvious through Auchincloss's effective changes in tone and conversational styles as the chapters change. While the characters may not be fully rounded, they are individualized enough that the reader will remember them, as each character reveals at least one important characteristic of the family as a whole. The novel is a fascinating sociological study which shows Auchincloss's own closeness to the social milieu that he observes--honest, straightforward, and without a shred of satire. Mary Whipple

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A VERY REWARDING READ, May 28, 2005

By 

D. Blankenship (The Ozarks) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: East Side Story: A Novel (Hardcover)

I must begin by stating that the world Mr. Achincloss writes of is as alien and as far removed from my world as a world created by a SiFi writer. It is far removed from my world culturely, geographically and philosophically. That is okay though. This little book is a true pearl. Each chapter is a wonderfully crafted sketch of various members of an elite New York family, starting just before the Civil War. Mr Auchincloss certainly has a wonderful command of the language and is certainly a true story teller. This is one of those books that you can read sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph and relish each and every one, almost as a separate entity. I found the writing style easy on the eye and mind and the entire flow of the book was true to itself from beginning to end. A wonderful read and I highly recommend. You probably will want to purchase this one as it deserves more than one read.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect example of the genre, March 7, 2005

By 

Margaret Dybala "too many books, too little time" (Pearland, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: East Side Story: A Novel (Hardcover)

Auchincloss continues to amaze me. When I saw this book in the "new fiction" stack at the library, I was astounded, since I would have thought the author would have either passed away, or at least stopped writing, a long long time ago. He began publishing his books almost 60 years ago. Although I share neither the class nor the education of this author, I have always found his books as beautiful as perfectly polished stones. They do not "live" in the way some fiction does, yet you can never forget his characters. This book is no different. It is a sort of chronicle of a family's history, starting in Scotland before the American Civil War, through immigration and settling here in the states. Each generation is seen and described by certain members of that generation. This could be very dry, yet it never fails to entertain. Golly, Mr. Auchincloss! I hope you are still serving up these books in another 20 years! Keep writing!