More Auchincloss

East Side Story
by Louis Auchincloss (Houghton Mifflin; $24)
December 20, 2004 Text Size:

“East Side Story” (Houghton Mifflin;; $24); Auchincloss, Louis; New York; Presbyterians; Carnochan Family 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.♦