Fabulous Fiction Firsts #551
by muffy
The title - Everybody Rise *, a first novel by the Loeb Award-winning investigative reporter at The New York Times Stephanie Clifford, is taken from the Stephen Sondheim lyric to Ladies Who Lunch.
Set in the years leading up to the 2008 financial collapse, 26 year-old Evelyn Beegan finally lands a real job with a social-media start-up called People Like Us that aims at the elites, by overselling her New England prep school and society connections that are at best, marginal. Now she must deliver. Hoping to impress her new bosses by recruiting Camilla Rutherford ("the clear center of young New York") as a new member, she is not above using her good friend Preston Hacking ("a Winthrop on his mother's side,") to gain entry to the Adirondack camps, thick with socialites, Wall Streeters and Who's Who.
Evelyn has long felt like an outsider to her privileged peers, and despises her mother's social-climbing ways, but now she is forced to embrace them. With endless rounds of charity events, regattas, debuts, and excessive shopping and dining, Evelyn soon finds the lure of belonging intoxicating, and starts trying to pass as old money herself. When her father's unfortunate downfall becomes public, she chooses to distance herself rather than to rally around family.
"A masterful tale of social climbing and entrenched class distinctions, as seen through the eyes of an outsider who desperately wants in. Tense, hilarious, and bursting with gorgeous language. Stephanie Clifford is a 21st-century Edith Wharton." Will appeal to fans of The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe and Rules of Civility by Amor Towles.
* = starred review
Blog Post
Subjects
Fabulous Fiction Firsts