The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
Read for: Gossip Girl
Last week on Gossip Girl, the characters were putting on this play. The episode was a particularly bad and unbelievable one and I thought they were trying to draw parallels between the play and what was going on in the show. Since I’d never read the book, or seen the movie or the play, I had no idea what was going on. I decided I should read the book and then try to understand the episode better. I still don’t think the episode was all that great but this post is about the book, not Gossip Girl!
The book takes place among the rich and privileged in New York in the 1870s. The story begins just as the main character, Newland Archer, has become engaged to his sweetheart, May. May’s cousin has just arrived from Europe where amidst some scandal, she has left her emotionally abusive husband. Archer immediately feels an attraction for the cousin, Countess Olenska. The story is mainly about the struggle Archer experiences as he falls in love with the Countess and realizes that his May, isn’t exactly what he had imagined her to be.
I really didn’t like the story. I found the characters and their emotions completely unbelievable. Archer had only a few encounters with the Countess before he was madly in love with her and she with him. And I say encounters because they hardly even talked to each other. They just seemed to sit around and stare at each other. Kind of a strange basis for a love affair. There just wasn’t any depth to the characters.
I also found the story really slow. I had a really hard time getting into the story and even then I just kept waiting for something to happen and nothing ever did! I could tell the whole story in a couple of sentences and there wouldn’t be any important information missing! But I won’t, because I don’t want to spoil the ending for those of you who may still want to read the book.
This book did win a Pulitzer and in spite of everything else I’ve said about the book, I can see why it did. The writing is really good. It was very poetic and the descriptions were particularly good. At times her writing was satirical as well. She allowed us to see the ridiculousness of some of the social traditions that existed at that time.
Overall, I think it’s definitely a book worth reading as long as you aren’t expecting much of a story.
