Elliot’s Reading August 2023
Edith Wharton’s late novel The Children (1928) is far from her best known for some obvious reasons, the vapid title for one, but it deserves more attention and acclaim that has eluded it for many years. First, the problems: EW has set up a tough standard as the novel is about competing cliques of wealthy and idle New Englanders traveling at leisure in Europe with an entourage of Children from various bad and broken marriages; in the opening scenes, the protagonist, a civil engineer whose job takes him around the world passing for a brief vacation - his name is simply Boyne; he’s aboard a Mediterranean cruise boat and at first frets that he knows nobody aboard - of course that turns out to be false in the microscopic world of EW’s novels - and the entourage that he knows includes a group of 7 ?) children loosely related at best - the Wheatons, they’re called - and Boyne finds himself ever deeply involved in their lives - in fact, he becomes their unofficial guardian given the task of ensuring that nothing breaks up this group of 7 - which of course it will and does. The downside: the characters are so privileged and unaware of their privileges and small-mindedness and most of all parental neglect that we hate most of the characters, inevitably - as in many EW novels in fact. What saves this one and makes reading worthwhile is the intellectual and emotional journey that Boyne takes on, willingly and foolishly, and how this burden that he assumes gradually wastes away his life - and the novel ends with some stunning and beautiful passages.
Graham Greene’s late-career novel Travels with my Aunt (1969) is clearly one the funniest of his many publications, a bildungsroman/travelog novel in which the narrator is a self-described bland and obscure personality, retired after long and dull career as a banker in a small branch office, never married never even in love (possibly virginal? repressed homosexual?), his one passion being the dahlias in his garden - who at his beloved mother’s funeral he meets for the first time his eponymous aunt who reveals to him several family secrets (his mother was really his stepmother, e.g.) and sweeps him up into her eccentric and adventuresome social life, which includes friendships and romances (she’s 7+) with several characters, often disreputable, and brings him along on some impulsive, poorly planned trips (e.g. ride the Orient Express to Turkey and then turn around quick and come home to London) that change his once-sheltered life. The novel builds toward a new world for narrator Henry in of all places Paraguay, rich with gunfights and criminals (much like in an earlier GG tropical novel), drawing into a Paraguay prison and tied to a smuggling scheme that he barely comprehends though his experience as a banker provides useful if dubious info. Watching Henry fall apart and be won over to the dark side is part of the hilarity here, and though on a literal level the novel makes no sense and is extraordinarily improbable it’s total fun to read - even, for ex., just GGs description of morning life in a tropical city.
The kindest thing to say about Richard Russo’s novel Chances Are… (2019) is that it doesn’t stand up well against his previous and much more engaging works from Mohawk. Empire Falls, et al. Briefly, it’s a story of 4 men in their 60s, college buddies, who go on a weekend retreat to Martha’s Vineyard where they pine for the woman, Jacy, with whom they’d all had a crush back in college days. How this all plays out make for a novel both improbable (why for example did J. fall off the map - a missing-person case that has dropped from all attention for some40 years!) and dissatisfying (it’s all told through recollection about this past love and what became of her - rather than in scenes that deepen the mystery and hold our attention). In short, he’s a fine novelist, but I would’t start an interested reader with this one.
