The Age of Innocence

1920, 1962 Signet Classic edition
Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence
Original price unknown, bought used for $1.50
Falling apart paperback, with many loose pages
B-

This won the Pulitzer prize, presumably for how it captures the New York society world of half a century earlier.  The background, of the mores and the furnishings, the gossip and the fashions, is well done.  But I can't say I'm particularly drawn in by the central romance between Newland and Ellen.  Wharton has a tendency to describe people as being one way while they come across as another, and I don't think this is entirely a case of an unreliable narrator.  Countess Ellen is supposed to be vibrant but she seems a little bland, other than a slightly "European" way of speaking.  Newland's wife, May, is supposed to be shallow and innocent, but she comes across as much deeper and more sophisticated than either Newland and May, who are assumed (by the reader and by their peers) to be having a grand love affair, but it turns out that they don't get past a few kisses, some of them on the wrist.  And then the ending, where Newland has a chance to see Ellen after about 25 years but passes it up, captures his essential passivity.  Perhaps it's because it's an age of innocence, but there's much more talk about running off together than any actual movement towards that.

Oddest of all is the view of Newland and May's children, ca. 1900.  They're supposed to be very modern, but they come across as more post-Great-War than turn-of-the-century.  It's as if the closer Wharton gets to the contemporary world, the less she can make fine distinctions about modernity.  Still, the book is readable, if not worth replacing.  I could see checking it out from the library in another decade or two.

Speaking of eras, although I'm only a little over one-fifth into the 1900s, I've now done more posts on that century than on any other.