East Side Story
A Novel
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3.7 • 11 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A "novel of power and hypocrisy in upper-class New York" that follows the rise of one prominent family, generation after generation (The New Yorker).
How did the families who live on Manhattan's Upper East Side get to where they are today? This engaging saga by a New York Times–bestselling author charts the rise of an uncommon family in America's grandest city.
East Side Story tells of the Carnochan family whose Scottish forebears established themselves in New York's textile business during the Civil War. From there they quickly moved on to seize prominent positions in the country's top schools and Manhattan's elite firms. As the novel unfolds, Carnochans across generations recount stories about their 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 Louis Auchincloss's fiction: What makes for a meaningful life in a family that has so much?
"Some writers inform, some instruct, and some tell how rewarding good prose can be," John Kenneth Galbraith once observed. "Louis Auchincloss does all three." In its starred review, Kirkus Reviews called East Side Story "a rich chronicle . . . that succeeds in humanizing a rare and much-maligned species of Americans for those who don't come across them very much." Auchincloss's superb novel is both a loving and wicked look at New York's Yankee aristocracy as only this sublime master of manners can provide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred review.EAST SIDE STORYLouis Auchincloss. Houghton Mifflin, $24 (240p) 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.
