A family in need ...

For nearly six decades, ever since the publication of his first novel in 1947, Louis Auchincloss has been anatomizing the manners and mores of what some have called America’s ruling class: the East Coast aristocracy who long dominated business, finance, law, academe and politics. Now 87, Auchincloss turns his attention to family history with the Carnochans, an upwardly mobile, canny and clannish clan not unlike his own. Although “East Side Story” spans five generations and more than a century, it does not follow the form of a traditional family saga.

Compression being a mode far more congenial to Auchincloss, he has constructed this novel as a set of 12 ingeniously interrelated short stories featuring 11 different members of the Carnochan clan. They are descendants of David Carnochan, an enterprising Scottish immigrant who made his fortune in textiles in the mid-19th century. In 1904, a second David Carnochan, teenage great-grandson of the original “Emigrator,” asks his older relatives about the dynasty’s founder.

Young David’s bachelor great-uncle Peter, an author of historical romances and the Emigrator’s youngest son, wryly dismisses any romantic notions about the family’s origins: “I suspect ... that the Carnochans in the Old World were pretty much what they became in the New: good burghers with a sharp eye for a deal. You would not have found one of them risking a copper penny for Mary Stuart or Bonnie Prince Charlie.” But Peter also has a genuinely romantic story to tell about the Emigrator’s middle son, idealistic Andrew, who died in the Civil War.

Although David had hoped to discover what the original David was like, it’s his own character that emerges most sharply in the course of the novel. We first see him through the eyes of the older generation as a bright, agreeable lad. The portrait grows much darker, however, as we view him from the perspective of his own generation. His good-hearted, straight-arrow cousin, Gordon, the only character accorded two chapters of his own, has painful and repeated experiences of David’s duplicity. Yet he is never quite able to break free of him, just as no Carnochan ever seems to stray far from the family circle.

Clever, cold, ambitious and calculating, David is in many ways the quintessential Carnochan -- and the most clannish. His regard for “family values,” however, is anything but sentimental. Family to him is not something warm and fuzzy but an instrument for consolidating power, wealth and social position. The only people he’s ever loved are his deceased sister, Estelle, and his sensitive and engaging son, Ronny.

The novel follows Ronny and his cousins into adulthood and, in Ronny’s case, middle age, but the last chapter returns us to the previous generation, with the story of Gordon’s sister Loulou, a very atypical Carnochan, who neither made money nor married it but chose to become a nurse. In her later years, she collects materials for a family history, only to conclude that it isn’t worthwhile. On this dour but neatly ironic note of skepticism, Auchincloss brings the Carnochans’ story to a close.

Perhaps because he writes about upper-class characters, focusing on the nuances of their perceptions and motivations, Auchincloss has been likened to Henry James. But he’s refreshingly unlike the Master in at least one respect. His style of exposition is as concise and pithy as James’ is tortuous and prolix, as in this crisp, insightful account of the young Gordon’s response to being duped by David: “Instead of facing his cousin indignantly with the charge of fraud, Gordon sought desperately in his mind to excuse him. He could not bear to think that a friend and cousin would treat him so shabbily. It was suddenly vital to him that David should remain what he had always taken him to be.”

Indeed, if you were to cross James with La Rochefoucauld, you might come up with Auchincloss, a novelist committed to examining the complicated layers of character, psychology and society but capable of summing up his conclusions in sparkling epigrammatic prose. *