Edith Wharton

Having just finished my first novel by Edith Wharton, let me say up front how exquisite her writing is, how powerful her form. There are parts of The House of Mirth which, for me, approach some sort of stylistic perfection. Wharton's prose fit together like pieces of a puzzle: each word plays its part, each phrase yields to the next. If nothing else, reading Mirth was a reminder of what real writing looks like, how it progresses and builds on itself. 

Wharton's novels have been the subject of considerable scholarship, and I'm not sure that I'll have much new to add. I did, though, want to offer a few observations:

• On the surface, House is built as other novels of the time: a rise and fall, a story of social etiquette and economic advancement. I was reminded, for instance, of Howells's Rise and Fall of Silas Lapham, a novel written twenty years earlier.

• Unlike Lapham, however, Mirth brims with life, and in this way, hinted at the novels which came a generation later: Fitzgerald, for example, explored similar paths through social convention and affluence. 

• Like Fitzgerald, Wharton did not, however, shy from ruin, and Mirth is very much a book about the influence of modern capitalism: Lily Bart -- Wharton's central character -- is preoccupied by her financial prowess; with it, she maintains her social station; without it, she falls. 

• Bart's quest -- for love, for luxury -- is subject to repeated frustration. Bart sometimes attributes this to a conniving set of acquaintances; at other times, she concedes that her frustration is self-inflicted, and that it owes as much to the disloyalty of her cohort as to her own inability to imagine herself as anything less than rich. 

• Wharton is excellent, I think, on gender dynamics, and on the crippling expectations of women at all rungs of the social ladder. For those at the top, however, those expectations were unyielding, and Bart's quest for a husband is, in practice, is a search for material wealth. Love is a thing only uncovered amidst the depths of despair. 

• One final thought: there is an unavoidable element of bourgeois dalliance in this novel. But what's more powerful -- more important -- is the sense of action. Whereas other novels of this era focus on the mental anguish of the bored or rich, Mirth is propelled by movement, by decisions. To achieve the stability and affluence she craves -- to assume a life, in effect, with minimal movement -- Lily Bart keeps busy. This is the story of her questing, and of her tragic fall. 

The last word is reserved for Wharton: "She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowing blossom of her beauty."