What Wharton could have learned from James

Great as Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence is, and rich though her writing may be with trenchant observations and winsome turns of a phrase - I'm assiduously marking up my ibook edition with yellow "notes" - there are a few things that Wharton could have learned from her great friend Henry James (previous post suggested a few things James could have learned from Wharton): although I cannot foretell the entire course of the novel from the start, the set-up is much more schematic and in some ways predictable that you'd find in any James novel: Archer is torn between two women, his fiancee the conventional and rather boring May Welland and her cousin, the Countess Olenska, iconoclastic and independent and "experienced." You tell me: which way's he gonna go? It's pretty obvious - we just don't know what the cost will be. James, for all his maddening circumlocutions, is more subtle in building the structure of his novels and more nuanced and surprising - and sometimes exasperating - in the delineation of character and relationships. I remember my final post on Portrait was title: How could you! I don't think I ever feel that about the decisions that Wharton characters make (Fromm may be an exception there). Probably no author writes better than Wharton about furnishings and decor and what they say about the personality, let alone the status, of her characters - but she gives away too much with her obsession with decor (a great personal interest of hers, obviously, as all visitors to The Mount know) - the furnishings "type" the character. James, again, is more subtle and nuanced; when he describes a character in a setting - the room with the balcony or the well-furnished urban palace in Ambassadors, as two examples - he manages to evoke a whole mood and feeling, whereas Wharton's rooms or environments seem at times like a catalogue of objects. Finally, James's great theme was the American abroad, which leads (at his best) to a real collision of forces and cultures; even though James is far more limited and narrow in social class than almost any other great writers, Wharton at times feels a little constricted - her social world, at least in Innocence, is so narrow. In one odd sequence, Archer walks from his office near Washington Square up to maybe 30th Street and he sees a # of people going in and out of buildings and seems to know them all - as if NYC ca 1870 was a tiny village, which it clearly was not - except in a literary imagination. She's a little blind to the vastness of the social world of New York.