East Side Story

Rating:
Summary: Auchincloss at his best
Review: If written by a different author, this generational saga might have been a heavy doorstop of a book. Auchincloss, however, made it a series of short story-like chapters illuminating the characters of twelve members of an East Side (Manhattan) family from the late 1800s to the 1970s in less than 230 pages. The name of each person written about is listed in bold text on a family tree printed on the back of the contents page. Auchincloss is a master writer who draws you in and makes you care about every character one after another. I disagree with one of the critics on Amazon of Auchincloss' last book, _The Scarlet Letters_ who said his style is wooden and his story-telling skills haven't progressed in 50 years. I think his last two books are among his best.

Rating:
Summary: "The Carnochans seemed dedicated to their own permanence."
Review: 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


Rating:
Summary: Informative yet not completely satisfying.
Review: Yet how many books are.. completely satisfying that is?! Still, although the book did provide me with some insight of the lives of upper-class New Yorkers and how they achieved and kept their affluence, I did not find any of the little stories that come together to form the family history of the Carnochans, very engaging or entertaining. On the contrary, I found them a bit dry. That is to say nothing of the author's abilities. Although the novel reminds a bit of a history lesson, Auchincloss's eloquence is what truly captivates the reader. And again, the lack of any intrigue in the novel probably pertains to the author's dedication of presenting a realistic image of east-coast aristocracy, thus lacking in any traumatic events that would bring any drama to the plot and entertainment to the reader, for they were probably unexistant the lives of those who were so careful to preserve their family's class status.