Review: ‘Everybody Rise,’ Stephanie Clifford’s Debut Novel, Features That Old-Money Scent

At an Ivy League varsity team dinner in a college dining hall, I was once chastised by a teammate for not passing the pepper along with the salt. The rule was familiar to me, but the insistence on it in these raucous surroundings surprised me. Oh, but that was just the point, said my Miss Manners; in her circle these rules mattered always and everywhere. Having nothing to do with actual courtesy or consideration, a ritual like this one was, it seemed to me, part of a code by which people were meant to recognize one another as belonging.

Unlike me, Evelyn Beegan, the heroine of Stephanie Clifford’s debut novel, "Everybody Rise," paid attention to the protocols of prep school. Wealthy by any reasonable standard — her father is a successful lawyer, and her mother is a Baltimore social climber of dubious lineage — Evelyn is strictly new money and thus without the ancestral chops to cut it with the Social Register set. It’s not until she lands a job at the social media start-up People Like Us, an invitation-only Facebook for social 1-percenters, that Evelyn is able to leverage her boarding school connections with the manners she learned from her mother to recruit the "elite’s elite" for the site.

Evelyn would have been wise to keep her interest in this crowd strictly professional. She soon begins to covet the status of those she’s trying to enlist and begins a wild pursuit to join what she sees as the apex of the New York social scene. From the start, it’s pretty clear she’s in for an unpleasant ride.

If a novel could succeed on detail and observation alone, "Everybody Rise" would be a grand slam. Ms. Clifford, a reporter for The New York Times, has a sharp eye for the rules (salad forks versus dessert spoons) and swag (stationery that is engraved, not printed) of high old-guard culture. She knows that old money drives a weathered 1985 Mercedes instead of a fresh-off-the-lot Beemer and that a Lilly Pulitzer dress belongs in the Hamptons, not the Adirondacks.

Ms. Clifford is canny enough not to lean too hard on a society that is clinging to its waning pageantry — whale belts, weekend regattas and embarrassing nicknames like Souse and Push — to maintain its status, if only to itself. Her characters speak credibly, if not pleasantly, about the looming subprime mortgage crisis and the hierarchy of Manhattan’s debutante balls. They call their huge Adirondack estates camps and their sprawling Maine mansions cottages. For a while, it is entertaining enough to watch Evelyn ingratiate herself with the old money that lunches at the Knickerbocker and Colony clubs.

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But the fun is short lived. Soon Evelyn’s efforts become desperate, then unhinged, then unforgivable. She plays fast and loose with the truth about her family (is it plausible that everyone on the Upper East Side is so busy checking Social Diary and Patrick McMullan that they don’t consult Google?), mistreats those who genuinely care about her and sinks into unfathomable debt.

It’s no secret that this novel is meant to recall a classic from an earlier gilded era — Edith Wharton’s "The House of Mirth." Evelyn’s financial, romantic and social woes are superficially similar to those of Lily Bart, Wharton’s beautiful but penniless heroine, who is beholden to a society that mistreats her and who must struggle to make a suitable marriage or slide into poverty. Like Lily, Evelyn rejects a suitor who loves her (and, silly girl, can’t you see he’s about to profit off the subprime mortgage crisis?) in favor of the high-toned playboy whom she, in a regressive bout of logic, tries to seduce hoping that he will rescue her socially and financially.

And here’s where Ms. Clifford’s story falls regrettably short of "Mirth." Lily, despite her many flaws is a sympathetic character with a believable inner life. She’s a victim of the ruthless hierarchy and patriarchy of Gilded Age New York. Evelyn, on the other hand, is victimized by her desire to be accepted by a dwindling and ruthless sliver of society, for reasons that are hard to embrace. She acknowledges the follies of this world while falling for it. You can’t forgive her for knowing and somehow not knowing better.

And the world has changed so much since Wharton’s time. Women are (for the most part) no longer dependent on their social status or marriage to make their way. Evelyn’s blunders do not win our sympathy; they make us toss the book aside and holler at this well-educated young woman to get a job. Had she Evelyn’s options, Lily would have done just that.

Nothing is more invigorating than a writer who can persuade us to pocket our moral compass and cheer on the bad folks — Humbert Humbert, Emma Bovary, Tom Ripley. Evelyn can aspire to a lot of things but not to being one of their number. Her goal is too pointless, her strategies too colorless, her manipulations too petty. Nor do we cheer for her fall. We just wait it out, cringe-worthy detail after cringe-worthy detail. And at those drunken or debased moments in which Evelyn is at her lowest, Ms. Clifford does succeed; her mastery of the sociological details of misguided ambition is sure and savage.

What saves "Everybody Rise" from emotional vacuity is the portrait of Evelyn’s parents, Barbara and Dale, and of her relationship to them. Ms. Clifford manages to humanize the upwardly mobile Barbara Beegan. You feel for her, her struggle for social traction and her desire that her daughter succeed where she, by her own estimation, fell short. But it’s Dale Beegan — a lawyer for the underdog — who is the real winner. He’s charming and engaging, and to his daughter’s horror, interested in those not in his tax bracket. His genuine manners are a refreshing break from all those stuffy types whose good behavior is an inch deep.

It’s difficult to write a novel of manners in a world where manners rarely count and people have forgotten why they mattered to begin with. Perhaps it would have been better had Ms. Clifford turned to a different Wharton novel for her inspiration: "The Custom of the Country." The novel’s heroine, the spoiled and ignorant new money heiress Undine Spragg, the Kim Kardashian of her day, understood that traditional class distinctions would one day erode, that one need not be polite to rise, and that no amount of success would ever be sufficient.

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