Everybody Rise
Stephanie Clifford, 2015
St. Martin's Press
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250077509
Summary
It's 2006 in the Manhattan of the young and glamorous. Money and class are colliding in a city that is about to go over a financial precipice and take much of the country with it.
At 26, bright, funny and socially anxious Evelyn Beegan 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 the 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.
Bracing, hilarious and often poignant, Stephanie Clifford's debut offers a thoroughly modern take on classic American themes—money, ambition, family, friendship—and on the universal longing to fit in. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Seattle, Washington, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Awards—Gerald Loeb Award (journalism)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Stephanie Clifford is a Loeb-award winning reporter at the New York Times, where she has covered business, media and New York City. She is currently a Metro reporter covering federal and state courts in Brooklyn. She joined the Times in 2008 from Inc. magazine, where she was a senior writer.
Stephanie grew up in Seattle and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son and two cats. Everybody Rise is her first book. (From the publisher.)
See the author's "informal bio."
Book Reviews
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.
New York Times Book Review
A smart tragicomedy about a young woman attempting to infiltrate the "Primates of Park Avenue" crowd.... Ferociously incisive class commentary....a 21st-century fable of one woman's reconstruction.
Washington Post
Gossip Girl fans, rejoice! Behold the literary version of a Jenny-esque narrated story, had she met Blair and Serena in her mid-20s. Cue lies, affairs and mounting debt.
Marie Claire
The summer's most anticipated beach read...a funny, sharply observed debut novel about young one percenters in New York...a buzzy Tom-Wolfe-meets-Edith-Wharton novel of young Manhattan.
Hollywood Reporter
Author Stephanie Clifford has been described as a modern-day Edith Wharton.
Elle
Addictive: think Prep meets The Devil Wears Prada.
Good Housekeeping
The upstart heroine...wages a one-woman assault on the old-money snobbery of the Upper East Side, before the Wall Street stock market crash of 2008.... [A]n amusing page-turning beach read. But if the author is trying to suggest that after 2008, class and the UES no longer hold sway, her argument is thin.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Clifford...has penned either a...cautionary tale for those seeking access to this rarefied world.... 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. —Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal
A young woman who works at a tech startup tries to shoehorn her way into New York's high society.... But [she] spends so much time doing such bone-headed things...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.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think Barbara has such specific expectations for her daughter? When does Evelyn successfully push back against these, and how? Why do you think Evelyn comes to hold some of the same values as her mother? How does the Barbara-Evelyn relationship shift as the novel goes on? Do you have sympathy for Barbara?
2. Evelyn considers, at one point, how easy it would be if she could marry Preston. Do you think this would be a good pairing? Can marriages of convenience like this work? Should Preston’s sexuality, or Evelyn’s assessment of Preston’s sexuality, figure into her thinking more?
3. How porous is social class in America? Could Evelyn have made different decisions that would have allowed her to ultimately fit in in Camilla’s circle?
4. At the end, Charlotte updates Evelyn and tells her that all her former friends are just fine. Still, the financial crisis is coming. How do you think the characters who stay in New York make it through that? Do you think they are as untouchable as Charlotte seems to think? Now, several years after the financial crisis, do you see certain groups who haven’t been affected and certain groups who have?
5. When we first meet Evelyn, she feels overlooked: "But it would be nice to have a place for once, to have people look at her and think she was interesting and worth talking to, not to have them politely fumble for details about her life and get them wrong and instantly forget her. (Murray Hill, right? No, the Upper East Side. Ah, and Bucknell? No, Davidson.)" Why is that important to her? Does she achieve this place she’s looking for? Have you struggled with a similar goal? What happened?
6. Why does Scot end up accepted by this group in the end? What does he bring to the table that Evelyn does not?
7. Did you find Evelyn likable? Why or why not? How important is it to you as a reader that a book’s protagonist be likeable? What are books you’ve liked where the main character is unlikable? Do you have different expectations about likability for male and for female protagonists?
8. Do you think Dale committed bribery? Why or why not? How important is the question of her father’s guilt or innocence to Evelyn?
9. Charlotte seems to see herself as a moral arbiter in the book. Do you agree with her moral stance? Is she a good friend to Evelyn? Are there ways that Evelyn is a good friend to her?
10. At one point Evelyn puzzles over why debutante balls still exist when young women are hardly kept behind closed doors until age eighteen. What’s your take on this? Why do they continue to occur?
11. As Evelyn watches her father’s sentencing, she wonders why he’s receiving such a harsh punishment when others who have erred are not. "Why were the consequences so severe for him?" she asks. Is that something you see elsewhere in the novel—that rules apply to one set of people but not another? Are there current events where this apply? Or do you think she’s making excuses for her father—and for herself ?
12. Is Camilla and Evelyn’s friendship genuine? Why or why not? Have you had short-term friendships? Why didn’t they work out? What makes for a real and lasting friendship?
13. Do you think Evelyn and Scot are well-paired as a couple? At the novel’s end, after Evelyn has changed, would you see them working out?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)