The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

I can already tell I won’t be able to do this book justice. I’ll just get this out of the way now: I loved this book. Rock will laugh at my “sentimental female nature, the typical silly-girl stereotype that sighs at the doomed love affair and cries during the film adaptation.” Well, in fact, I did. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. Daniel Day Lewis is partly to blame, damn him and his awesome acting (though the hair…was a tad ridiculous). I didn’t cry when I finished the book, but watching the movie afterwards really put that last nail in, as the saying goes. The screenplay adaption went well beyond anything I expected. I remember liking the movie when I saw it years ago. I didn’t expect such a faithful adaptation of the novel.

It would be hard to improve on the book anyway, or to mess up the carefully-aligned series of events that take place. The novel won Edith Wharton the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, making her the first woman to receive one, which is a pretty cool feat right there. The novel is probably best known (at least, that’s what I knew about it before I picked it up) for its accurate portrayal of New York City’s upper class during the late 1800s. Wharton herself grew up in that society. In the novel, she doesn’t scorn or condemn the society, but she does question the moral righteousness and stifling social codes that the society depicted in her novel adheres to.

The central character is Newland Archer, who finds himself questioning his society’s norms – norms which he strictly upheld at the start of the novel – in light of his perfect but dull marriage, his too-perfect wife, and his wife’s modern and unconventional cousin. You see the triangle, I’m sure. My favorite aspect of the book was the complexity of Newland’s and May’s personalities. Newland’s views change quite radically (radically for the context, anyway), from strictly upholding the established social norms and seeking the perfect marriage with the perfect New York socialite, to questioning everything his society believes and the motivations of all the people he thought he knew so well. The catalyst for this is, of course, May’s cousin, the Countess Olenska, a woman who is the complete opposite of every cookie-cutter debutante he’s ever met. Then there’s May, who Newland generally attributes as a product of New York society, with little opinions or motivations of her own beyond those which have been instilled in her. In my opinion, one of the saddest parts of the book is that Newland never really understood his wife, while becoming painfully clear at the end that it was May who always understood him.

And yet Wharton doesn’t portray Newland as a complete jerk, but as a person in the middle of a personal crisis. That, I think, is why the book works so well, instead of coming off as just a book about someone’s affair. The entire environment also makes the book enjoyable. Wharton’s careful descriptions, both of characters and settings, rich with detail and meaning just make every paragraph fun to read, even if she’s merely discussing the emotions evoked in Newland by a lady’s forgotten parasol or the preparations for the annual society ball. I’m keeping a copy of this book in my phone, as I would definitely pick it up again to read a chapter here or there.

21 down, 31 to go.