The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

 The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

It's the 90s! The 1890s, that is. We're in high society in New York City, and our protagonist/narrator, Newland Archer, is about to marry May Welland and cement his status as part of the elite class. In the months leading up to his marriage, though, Newland is re-introduced to an childhood acquaintance, May's cousin, Ellen Olenska. Ellen married a count in Europe, but has left her husband (scandal!) and wants to begin anew in her hometown of the Big Apple. At first, she is not terribly well received (too bohemian, not the 'right' sort of wealthy, a separated woman, etc.) but eventually May's family stands up for her and she is lukewarmly welcomed back into NY society. Newland falls for Ellen (and vice versa), but for a variety of reasons, their love is not meant to be, and Newland marries May and has several children with her. Ellen moves to Paris (to live independently, not to return to her husband) and their lives diverge forever. 

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Okay, so I gave you a little snapshot of the plot; there's obviously a lot more that happens, but those are the most salient points. If you're wondering about the book's feel, it's basically Gossip Girl from a hundred years ago. I really enjoyed Wharton's writing style, as well as the forbidden love story; if you haven't read it, I highly recommend! Here are some highlights from my point of view. 

Portraits of People

Wharton does an excellent job of capturing the essence of each of these high society characters. Here are a few of my favorites:

Mr. Sillerton Jackson

In addition to this forest of family trees, Mr. Sillerton Jackson carried between his narrow hollow temples, and under his soft thatch of silver hair, a register of most of the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society within the last fifty years. 

Mrs. Henry van der Luyden

She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death. lololololz.

Ellen Olenska (née Mingott)

She was a fearless and familiar little thing, who asked disconcerting questions, made precocious comments, and possessed outlandish arts, such as dancing a Spanish shawl dance and singing Neapolitan love-songs to a guitar.  this was Ellen as a young girl, though the description still fits her as an adult. ;)

Fashionable! Do you all think so much of that? Why not make one's own fashions?  

Female author, male protagonist

My biggest issue with this book was that the narrator/protagonist was Newland. AKA, a man. I'm sure it was revolutionary enough to write and publish as a woman in the early 20th century, and who knows what forces were at play, but I wish Ellen could have been the real heroine of this book. Newland felt more like a 3rd party observer, which has its own allure and adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the novel, but I couldn't help feeling like Edith was hiding somewhere under Ellen's surface. 

If you've read my blob, this is not the first time I've made this complaint. Other 'offenders' from this blob include, in chronological order:

(Edith Wharton)

- Flannery O'Connor

- Isabel Allende

- J.K. Rowling

Newland stands up for women's issues, saying things like: Women ought to be free - as free as we are. But it wasn't enough for me to feel satisfied. I still felt a bit like Ellen was muted, which felt like a reflection of misogyny/sexism.

Moments that reminded me of Proust/Swann

There were many, which I admit I found quite endearing, since you know how much I love my Marcel. 

• He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation. 

Murakami moments

Several of Archer's reflective moments reminded me of Murakami, in particular The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in their sort of existential despair/displacement. Admittedly, I felt I needed to lean away from these sentiments since being in the middle of a pandemic when one is forced to stay at home 98.4% of the time could bring out many of these feelings in me if I let it. ;)

• He was out of spirits and slightly out of temper, and a haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain. 

• The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.

• What's the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment, you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring - that's all.

• Since [that day] there had been no farther communication between [Newland and Ellen], and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgements and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent - that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.

• I don't know what you mean by realities. The only reality to me is this. 

Sinecure (a position requiring little or no work but giving the holder status or financial benefit)

This was a word on a Latin test Mr. Lausch gave us back in high school, and I got it wrong. He had planted a tricky fake-out choice, something about a poison without a cure, and I was fooled. For a long time, I wondered what an example of a sinecure would be. This description of Newland's job feels like it perfectly fits the bill: 

No one was deceived by his pretense of professional activity. In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr. Letterblair was the head, and which were mainly engaged in the management of large estates and 'conservative' investments, there were always two or three young men, fairly well-off, and without professional ambition, who, for a certain number of hours of each day, sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading the newspapers. Though it was supposed to be proper for them to have an occupation, the crude fact of money-making was still regarded as derogatory, and the law, being a profession, was accounted a more gentlemanly pursuit than business. But none of these young men had much hope of really advancing in his profession, or any earnest desire to do so; and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was already perceptibly spreading. 

Where shall I dine to ameliorate my gout? 

There's a savage kind of wit in how Wharton describes high society, which I'm sure is part of what made this book successful. I loved this discussion of how one had to balance one's dinner invitations to have a rounded diet of nutrition and mental stimulation. 

You couldn't have everything, after all. If you dined with the Lovell Mingotts you got canvas-back and terrapin and vintage wines; at Adeline Archer's you could talk about Alpine scenery and "The Marble Faun"; and luckily the Archer Madeira had gone round the Cape. Therefore when a friendly summons came from Mrs. Archer, Mr. Jackson, who was a true eclectic, would usually say to his sister: 'I've been a little gouty since my last dinner at the Lovell Mingotts' - it will be do me good to diet at Adeline's.

Mr. Jackson had helped himself to a slice of the tepid filet which the mournful butler had handed him with a look as sceptical as his own, and had rejected the mushroom sauce after a scarcely perceptible sniff. He looked baffled and hungry, and Archer reflected that he would probably finish his meal on Ellen Olenska. This was one of my favorite lines in the book.

Zeugma (a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g., John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts )

In another high school flashback, shout out to Mrs. Wagner (I think? Sorry, I'm blanking on the name and she left the district pretty soon after) for teaching us figures of speech in AP Language and Composition. I fell in love with zeugma and it's still a delight to me whenever I stumble across it. 

As Archer mustered [Madame Olenska's] modest front he said to himself that the Polish Count must have robbed her of her fortune as well as of her illusions.  Zing! Zeugma!

Lines I Liked

• Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this arrangement, which recalled scenes in French fictions, and architectural incentives to immorality such as the simple American had never dreamed of.

• 'Well, we need new blood and new money - and I hear she's still very good-looking', the carnivorous old lady declared. 

• Beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed Mrs. Archer's world lay the almost unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians, and 'people who wrote'.

• There was something perverse and provocative in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawing room, and in the combination of a muffled throat and bare arms; but the effect was undeniably pleasing. 

• The idea that he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts. I love these alliterative "p" pairings!

• He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime. 

Title possibilities for this blob

• In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

• If we don't all stand together, there'll be no such thing as Society left. 

• It was just for such distinctions that the young man cherished his old New York even while he smiled at it.

Words New to Me

vaticination - the act of prophesy; prediction

Well, dear readers, I'm on to the next. I'll leave you with a few of what I'm calling 'love lines'. In reading about love, I think about what I would want in a partner, and this book had several things to check off. 

(1)  Newland, on his wife May's clashing sense of taste - His only comfort was to reflect that she would probably let him arrange his library as he pleased - which would be, of course, with 'sincere' Eastlake furniture, and the plain new bookcases without glass doors. Ahh, yes. I will, of course, need to arrange my library as I like. I want to buy a house just so I can have a dedicated library. 

(2) Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their isolation. This moment between Ellen and Newland reminded me of the scene in To the Lighthouse where Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are reading. Here's my note from that blob: 

When reading is like dreaming

One of my favorite scenes in the whole novel is when Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, whose relationship is complicated, but affectionate, simply sit together in his study and read, each attentively drawn in to their own book. As mentioned above, Mr. Ramsay is reading Sir Walter Scott, and Mrs. Ramsay has picked up a book lying nearby.

Mrs. Ramsay raised her head and like a person in a light sleep seemed to say that if he wanted her to wake she would, she really would, but otherwise, might she go on sleeping, just a little longer, just a little longer? She was climbing up those branches, this way and that, laying hands on one flower and then another.

Yes, please. I would like someone who can read with me, and with whom I can enjoy reading. 

(3) How shall I explain? It's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again. I love this line. Harder to articulate what it would mean in a desire for a partner, but I think I'll know it when it's there.

(4) 'I want - I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like [mistress] - categories like that - won't exist. Where we shall simply be two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing and nothing else on earth will matter.'

    She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. 'Oh, my dear - where is that country? Have you ever been there? 

It's a romantic notion, but hey - a girl can dream! ;) 

Sending you all rainy day vibes, cozy pre-fall feelings, and happy cups of tea. We may be looking for other realities these days, but at least we can fantasize about designing our own libraries! I'm off to tackle The Known World. Keep each other safe! Keep faith!