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Summary
Summary
An instant New York Times bestseller
Chosen as one of Summer's Best Books by People Magazine
Featured in Time Magazine's Summer Reading
Entertainment Weekly 's Summer Must List
Good Housekeeping Beach Reads Feature
"A witty tale about a high-society wannabe...Little is more delicious than watching an ambitious but tragically flawed protagonist brought down - especially in a designer cocktail dress." -The Washington Post
Everyone yearns to belong, to be part of the "in crowd," but how far are you willing to go to be accepted? In the case of bright, funny and socially ambitious Evelyn Beegan, the answer is much too far...
At 26, Evelyn is determined to carve her own path in life and free herself from the influence of her social-climbing mother, who propelled her through prep school and onto New York's glamorous Upper East Side. Evelyn has long felt like an outsider to her privileged peers, but when she gets a job at a social network aimed at the elite, she's forced to embrace them.
Recruiting new members for the site, Evelyn steps into a promised land of Adirondack camps, Newport cottages and Southampton clubs thick with socialites and Wall Streeters. Despite herself, Evelyn finds the lure of belonging intoxicating, and starts trying to pass as old money herself. When her father, a crusading class-action lawyer, is indicted for bribery, Evelyn must contend with her own family's downfall as she keeps up appearances in her new life, grasping with increasing desperation as the ground underneath her begins to give way.
Author Notes
As a New York Times reporter, Loeb-award winning journalist Stephanie Clifford covered courts, business and media. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, she grew up in Seattle and lives in Brooklyn. Everybody Rise is her first book.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The upstart heroine of this debut novel by New York Times reporter Clifford wages a one-woman assault on the old-money snobbery of the Upper East Side before the Wall Street stock market crash of 2008. Raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland by a charismatic lawyer and a mother who futilely yearned to be part of "high society," Evelyn Beegan went to an elite New England boarding school and rubbed elbows with wealthy old-money families, though she was only middle-class herself. Now a job at a start-up social network for "1-percenters" requires her to worm her way into that social set-and she finds herself addicted to the heady world of debutante balls, museum benefits, and women who spend their days lunching, shopping, and going to spas. Her desperate social climbing leads her to lie outrageously about her background, and she gets deep into debt trying to keep up with the leisure class. Narrator Kellgren has a blast with the voices here-plummy Thurston Howell tones for aristocratic rich men, a bratty prep-school/Valley girl voice for a spoiled debutante, an expansive Southern accent for Evelyn's dad, and even an authentic German accent for a housekeeper. Her marvelous narration makes an entertaining listen. A St. Martin's hardcover. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A young woman who works at a tech startup tries to shoehorn her way into New York's high society. The most notable thing about Evelyn Beegan's life so far is that she went to Sheffield Academy, a New England boarding school where the vibe is so preppy that her social-climbing mother, Barbara, bought a used 1985 Mercedes once she realized "none of the old-money mothers would deign to drive a fresh-off-the-lot BMW like the Beegans had shown up in." (Clifford, a New York Times reporter, has a good eye for class markers.) Now Evelyn works at People Like Us, a social networking site trying to recruit "the elite's elite," and she's busy using Sheffield friends such as Preston Hacking, "a Winthrop on his mother's side," to insinuate herself into the exclusive swirl of charity balls and weekends in the Adirondacks where she can engage new members. But it's more than business to Evelyn: she genuinely admires luminaries like Camilla Rutherford, "the clear center of young New York," and concocts ever more elaborate lies about her own background in an attempt to befriend them. Hasn't Evelyn ever heard of Google? It shouldn't be hard for people to find out she was never a debutante in Baltimore, among other things. Having her father, a lawyer who specializes in suing pharmaceutical companies, indicted for bribery isn't a secret she'll be able to keep forever, either. There's been a big debate in the past few years about whether literary characters need to be likable, and of course many great books feature protagonists you wouldn't want to befriend. But Evelyn spends so much time doing such bone-headed things, and for a goal that seems so dated, that's it's hard to work up any interest in what happens to her. Clifford's debut tries to be a Bonfire of the Vanities for our time but doesn't make it. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
A QUARTER-CENTURY AGO, Harper's published an essay by Tom Wolfe titled "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel." Wolfe, whose best seller "The Bonfire of the Vanities" had been published two years earlier, called for a revival of the sort of novel that emerged during the 19th century: realist fiction that was wide in its scope and accurate in its detail, grounded in the kind of reporting that journalistic nonfiction demands. Since Wolfe, other journalists have attempted to produce a richly textured, densely reported novel of the city. Kurt Andersen, a writer for Time before he became a co-founder of Spy magazine, imagined Manhattan on the brink of the digital age in "Turn of the Century," while Amy Waldman, a former New York Times reporter, took the mutilated, post-9/11 city as her subject in the excellent "The Submission." Now comes "Everybody Rise," by Stephanie Clifford, a Metro reporter for The Times. Clifford, who covered media and advertising in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crash, has written a novel with similarly large ambitions - this time, of capturing New York City in the overheated moment preceding the financial crisis. Clifford's protagonist, Evelyn Beegan, is a product of Sheffield Academy, an elite New England boarding school. One of her best friends, Preston Hacking, who works vaguely in investing, is "a Winthrop on his mother's side." Another close friend, Charlotte Macmillan, is the daughter of an executive at an international corporation; she has lived on several continents, speaks half a dozen languages and works for a private equity firm. Evelyn's origins are less confidently affluent and less socially secure. Her father, a charismatic Southern lawyer who grew up in a blue-collar mill town, specializes in suing pharmaceutical companies. Her ambitious but unfulfilled mother is determined to propel her daughter into ever higher circles. Evelyn's job isn't as lucrative as those held by her friends, but it's equally specific to the era: She's the director of membership for a start-up called People Like Us, a would-be Facebook for the rich. In a nod to Edith Wharton - whose "The House of Mirth," published in 1905 during what historians call the long 19th century, is a key reference point for Clifford - Evelyn lands the job by parading a familiarity with the upper crust that's partly gleaned from a college literature class, "Novels of the Gilded Age, Newport." Evelyn's role is to recruit her friends, and then their friends, for the site. But it swiftly becomes Evelyn's goal to be more than a new-media handmaiden: She wants a place in society for herself. While she scrambles upward in New York, however, her family back in Maryland is tumbling downward as her father is indicted by a federal grand jury, accused of bribing expert witnesses. In a tightly plotted narrative, Clifford shows how Evelyn's tenuous initiation into this most elite of social networks coincides with an increasingly desperate effort to secure her footing there. Clifford details the manners of the old-money set with a reporter's well-trained eye. Upper East Side hostesses have inscrutable, WASPy names like Push and Souse. She nicely captures the vile heartiness of a weekend at an Adirondack camp, where the table is set with antler candelabras and the luridly colored cocktails to be served at a fund-raising boat race are mixed in paint tins labeled "V" for "Virgin," "S" for "Strong" and "T" for "Toxic." Also well drawn are the arcane arrangements for the debutantes' "Bal Français," at which a boy dressed as Little Lord Fauntleroy performs the "Marseillaise," France's revolutionary anthem, while the moneyed guests sing rousingly along. The social practices of the young bankers to whose set Evelyn precariously belongs are persuasively cataloged. Clifford has a good ear for the competitive banter about who gets FedExed more C.I.M.s (confidential information memorandums) and for their perplexing insider language, like the use of the word "buck" to mean either a thousand dollars, a hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars, depending on the context. Hints are dropped of the impending crisis: Nouriel Roubini, the economist who forecast the housing crisis, is name-checked, and so is Bernard Madoff, not yet a disgraced Ponzi schemer but still a successful investor, the possession of whose private telephone number is in itself valuable social capital. Given this setup, it comes as something of a surprise that the novel ends before the crisis breaks, so the bubble economy, rather than being the merciless engine of Evelyn's fate, remains only the backdrop against which she experiences her personal downfall. Meanwhile, Clifford's depiction of these moneyed milieus is so convincingly repulsive that it's hard to be persuaded they hold that much charm, even for a striver like Evelyn. It's similarly hard to see the personal appeal of the well-placed individuals Evelyn courts. She becomes particularly enamored of the glossy heiress Camilla Rutherford, a mean girl with means, who quotes wisdom gleaned from her acupuncturist while shopping for sandals at Takashimaya. To secure Camilla's friendship and claim a coveted place alongside her, Evelyn tells egregious lies about her own background. Seemingly without much consideration, she betrays first her old friends and then her new ones. In an attempt to create a flawed heroine in the mold of Lily Bart, Clifford has given us one whose behavior borders on the sociopathic. Evelyn's actions and values leave little space in which the necessary sympathy of the reader might be kindled. Only occasionally, as in this suggestive, lyrical passage, do we get a glimpse of the New York that lies beyond the rarefied precincts of privilege: "Somewhere in the city, an orange cat finished chewing on a marjoram plant next to his studio apartment's door and leapt purring onto the shoulder of his owner, home early from work. Somewhere in the city, a young Chinese pianist sat down at the rehearsal hall and let his fingers play the first opening notes of the Emperor Concerto, notes that would envelop the little girl in row D of the Philharmonic that night in a shimmering cloud. A boy in Staten Island touched his finger to the lower back of the girl who had been just a friend until then." Evelyn has been too busy social climbing to pay much attention to these other members of the billion-footed city - the ones who don't wear Ferragamos - among whom she might have made a more satisfying life, as Charlotte reminds her at the novel's conclusion. "You've been trying to make it in Edith Wharton's New York," she says, but that New York "barely exists anymore." THE LOOSENING OF the strictures that governed Wharton's world is good news for Evelyn. Unlike Lily Bart, she isn't obliged to die in poverty. But their larger irrelevance presents something of a problem for the novelist who would take them as a principal theme. In the late-19th- and early-20th-century novels that Tom Wolfe so admired (and that Clifford gestures toward), invented characters are placed within worlds whose manners and constraints they're obliged to navigate. The enduring power of such works lies in the conflict between the specificity of an individual's desires and the larger, more powerful forces exerted by society. The pathos of Lily Bart's story derives from the inexorability of her fate. But Clifford's heroine has voluntarily adopted the codes and practices of an elite whose members ultimately grind her down. Evelyn has turned her back on the many other options that are available to her. In the novel's concluding pages, she comes to realize this; but by that time a reader might well have ceased to care whether she rises or falls in the vacuous world she has sought to conquer. REBECCA MEAD, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of "My Life in Middlemarch."
Library Journal Review
Twentysomething Evelyn Beegan has just enough social-climbing bona fides (prep school, good college, a somewhat prominent attorney father, a somewhat pedigreed mother) to reach the fringes of 2006 Manhattan high society. When she lands a job with People Like Us, a start-up social media site for superrich young New Yorkers, she is charged with quickly increasing membership. She uses her school friends, her minimal connections, her quick mind, her dogged research skills, and her facility for lying to gain entry into the charity events, regattas, debuts, and stunningly excessive shopping and dining experiences that define the lives of her targets. The deeper she gets, the more she needs, and eventually she pays a price more terrible than the massive debts she runs up trying to buy her way in. -Clifford, an award-winning reporter at the New York Times, has penned either a how-to (how-don't?) manual or a cautionary tale for those seeking access to this rarefied world. VERDICT A compulsive, up-close-and-personal read about the first cracks in the greed-and-bleed U.S. economy that went flying off the rails so spectacularly a short time later. [See Prepub Alert, 2/23/15.]-Beth -Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
