Beautifully written, impossible to put down, with an ending full of shocking twists.
Published: 1920
Much like Middlemarch (which is cleverly referenced in this book), this book is a gentle hand that grabs you by the ear and makes you pay attention. The floral, detailed descriptive language is almost hypnotic, but once the story takes hold of you it’s hard to put it down.
It was published in 1920, and takes place largely in the 1870s New York City. It’s the story of fancy-pants rich boy Newland Archer, newly engaged to lovely, high-society dullard May Welland. He finds himself suddenly falling in love with social outcast Ellen Olenska – May’s cousin, who returned to New York from Europe, escaping her husband under unclear circumstances.
It’s an extremely subtle book, full of subtext and sneaky reveals that require a careful eye. I’m sure I would have hated this book in my 20’s. Even now, each time I picked it up I needed to warm up to it – to slow my thinking down, force myself to pay close attention for about 15 minutes, before the story took hold of me again. It’s like walking from a busy street into a spa – there’s an adjustment period while you recondition yourself to the surroundings.
And the writing is just incredible. Here’s an example from early in the book, as we’re introduced to May’s grandmother:
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the center of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.
Harsh! And hilarious. The book is full of language that disarms you with its floridity but hits like a hammer.
The ending was full of twists – the last 40 pages burn like a Hollywood thriller film, and the book finishes on a beautiful, bittersweet note.