The Age of Innocence

My first Casual Classic, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (which you can download in various formats at Girlebooks).

I really, really liked it. I want to get a copy (yay for classics being cheap at 2nd hand stores!), reread it in a few years, and try some more Edith Wharton soon.

It's funny how you are lead to books. I looked up Edith Wharton after I heard her name in a Suzanne Vega song. I discovered Suzanne Vega when I was googling for songwriters similar to Dar Williams. I heard of Dar Williams via the Institute for Humanist Studies' podcast. I could go on...

The Age of Innocence was written just after WWI but the setting is 1870s New York. On one level it's a love triangle: Newland Archer is engaged to May Welland but finds himself drawn to her cousin, the Countess Olenska. It's also social commentary. Innocent May is the perfect woman by the standards of upper class New York. The Countess is more worldly, having returned from Europe and a disastrous marriage. Newland, who is intelligent enough to see through the rules and traditions of his society, becomes increasingly disillusioned and frustrated with the life he is expected to lead.

It's also a window into the culture of the time, from the perspective of a woman who lived through it and has the advantage of hindsight. There are heaps of those little details that make historical novels interesting. Like the fact that the wealthy New York women used to order their dresses from Paris and then not wear them for a couple of years because it was considered vulgar to be wearing the latest fashions.

I struggled with the first few pages, especially the chunks detailing the families the story focusses on, but after that I was hooked. I think it was this bit that made me decide I was going to like this book:

She sang, of course, "M'ama!" and not "he loves me," since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

There's a lot of ironic and witty commentary like that but overall the story isn't quite as light-hearted. To me it felt like slightly more serious and realistic Jane Austen. Witty, but serious.

Ok, now the film. There's a 1993 movie adaptation directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Danial Day-Lewis (Newland), Winona Ryder (May), and Michelle Pfeiffer (Countess Olenska). As a film, it's beautiful. It got an Oscar for the costumes, and the food... *drools* As an adaptation of the novel, it's AMAZING. After The da Vinci Code, I've been wary of watching movies too soon after reading the book but I watched The Age of Innocence a day after I finished it and didn't notice a single thing that had been changed or left out. Every time I got the feeling something needed explanation or elaboration, the voiceover quoted a passage from the book that did it. It was wonderful.

The last bit is about the ending and is full of spoilers, obviously. I made the text white so you can skip it if you like.

I know that the ending makes sense, and I can't think of any way it could have been different and still worked, but... Waaaaaah! I suspect I was being blindly optimistic but I held out hope for Newland and Ellen to the very end and couldn't believe it when he didn't go up. I wish they could have run away, joined a community of bohemians, and lived happily ever after. Also, I hate it when authors jump forward in time like that. :-(

One classic down, three to go! I read the first chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray last night and was less than thrilled by it but I'll persevere a little longer and see how it goes.

A good book has no ending. R.D. Cumming