Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, a William Trevor novel, and an Annie Ernaux novel from 2001

Elliot's Reading April 2023 

Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, a William Trevor novel, Annie Ernaux

It’s amazing how much better Edith Wharton’s 2nd novel, The House of Mirth (1905) is compared with her meandering first novel, The Valley of Decision - an incredible transformation over 4 years. How? Why? I don’t know the timing of her good friend Henry James, but I suspect he might have had a much greater influence on Mirth, a searing and incisive portrayal of the social scene among the old (mostly) families of New York in the early 20th century. Wharton’s writing, like James, requires a lot of close attention to every passage - and the attention is worthwhile: Her writing here is insightful, surprising, and revealing about each of the characters and their mental (and social) status. At the heart of the novel is Lily Bart - beautiful, mannered, but not from a long line of patriarchs and industrialists, just hanging on to the fringes of the social scene and, unlike all the others in her “set,” troubled by debt. She’s truly one of the great tragic heroes of modern fiction, right up alongside of Anna K. For much of the novel, we want to right her off as frivolous and irresponsible - she runs up a huge debt playing bridge w/ a group who could afford to lose (which she can’t), gets a married man who’s coming on to her to “invest” on her behalf, runs into deeper debt, and he has sex with her in recompense - note that EW, as the custom of the age would require, is extremely circumspect about sex throughout and esp re Lily’s fate. In any event, we grow from despising her and her social set - a snobbish group of old $ and arrivistes who do nothing but party, travel, and entertain without a thought of making the world a better place for others, but as she’s forced to leave this scene Lily experiences life asinine of her so-called friends ever did, including a stint in a working-class job in the garment district; EW is by no means a progressive and it’s not clear what Lily actually learns - and there are a few unfortunate swipes particularly near the end - notably a saccharine passage about a young woman whom LB had helped at a difficult life stage (involving out-of-wedlock pregnancy) - but that said the ending is powerful and moving and our empathy for LB remains fast and profound; one unfortunate aspect of the novel, however, is the crude portrayal of the only Jewish character, Rosedale, who sounds like a thug and whom we’re meant to despise -  because he has made his own fortune w/out the graces of the social class to which he aspires - as if the old-money social set is in any way better than he; just give him time, he could end up laughing at all of them. 

It gives me no joy to note how disappointed I’ve been by the novels of William Trevor; in March I posted on two of his novels that I couldn’t finish and here’s a 3rd that did nothing for me force 150 pages and so good-bye: Fools of Fortune (1983), in what seems to be an auto-fiction or thinly disguised memoir about a young man in rural Ireland, a Protestant family, well-to-do, and the son dreads leaving for boarding school but then does uneventfully leave and experiences many of the high-jinx (drinking, pranks against teachers) familiar in the genre. What it lacks is any great beauty, struggle, or driving force, a fully developed life - esp notable in comparison with the giants of the genre such as Joyce and more recently Knausgaard and Melrose (Patrick), or even in a lighter vein Prep or in a mystery vein such as Tarrt’s Secret History, to name a few. This sour note stands in contrast to my unrelenting praise for Trevor’s short stories, which I have said and still say are among the best of the past hundred years, unquestionably. How do you figure? Two other novels of his that I read much closer to their published date - The Old Boys (a comic romp) and Felicia’s Journey - were much better than these I’ve read recently or tried to - F’sJ in fact was made into a good movie, or so I’ve heard. But with some these other novels, he’s just lost in a thicket of prose. 

A Brief note on Annie Ernaux’s early novel ∫(2001), which for me was miles (kilometers?) away from her more recent The Years, about which I raved in an earlier post, but all the strengths of The Years - notably AE’s acute observations about the world and social changes and family issues and cultural shifts and fads and trends, in other words all we look and hope for in first-person, diary-like fiction - whereas the recently reissued Getting Lost, though daring and revealing in its day, a milestone for women writing about their sexual drive in a confessional but aggressive manner, has all of the flaws of such fiction - self-centered, narcissistic, and dreadfully dull rather than exciting and revealing, in other words quite the opposite of The Years - I turned it aside after 50 pp or so.