An acknowledged classic, the Pulitzer-prize winning Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton was a book I had been wanting to read for a while. Published in 1920 to universal acclaim, Edith Wharton captures in authentic detail the manners and mores of the New York society of those times.
At the heart of the book is the love triangle between Newland Archer, a young lawyer making his way up in fashionable society, and May Welland, his pretty wife, and May's cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska. It is easy to dwell too much on the love triangle - indeed Wharton does a superb job in depicting Archer's dilemma, his anguish and pain even as he tries to keep up the superficiality of his societally-approved relationship with May. It is indeed the age of innocence when artificiality is prized, and keeping appearances matters more than living honestly and justly. But the Age of Innocence is also a satirical work - Wharton is scathing in the depiction of a society that believes that it is far better to ask Ellen to return to a husband she has fled from, fled in fear of his abuse, than live the supposedly scandalous life she is leading in the States. New York society never embraces Ellen wholeheartedly despite Archer's best efforts and the social intrigue that Wharton has sketched would be too much to detail in a short blog post of this kind.
Instead, I dwell on the characters themselves - there seems to be a bit of Edith herself in Ellen. Like Ellen, Edith separated from her husband, and obtained a divorce in 1912. You can imagine well the reaction that Edith would have had to face. And it is in Ellen that I detect the most passion- there was a quiet fire in her that impressed me. May is portrayed as abject by Arthur but she surprises us all in the end with her determination to hold on to a man who clearly did not love her. And Arthur? I pitied him as he fought against his impulses and his love for Ellen, which comes all too late for him to change things. But I despised him his lack of courage. But then again, it was not courage that Arthur perhaps lacked - he was just the pawn in a society that had built itself on lies and hypocrisy, from which there was no escaping from.
Age of Innocence is a classic - undisputedly so. My only constraint while reading was trying to remember the sheer number of characters. I eventually gave up trying to understand which Mingott was who, and several of the minor characters I glossed over. It doesn't mar from the reading much, though. For Wharton has sculpted a masterpiece.
Verdict : Classic.
Rating : 5/5
Sounds powerful...
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