Elliot's Reading October 2023 - Wharton, Auster

Elliot’s Reading - October 2023

Edith Wharton’s early novel The Fruit of the Tree was published in 1907 and has largely been out of print and seldom read until a :K=Literary Classics” republication in 2004 and now I know why: The novel is 600+ pp and it feels like more. The roots and the backbone are there - Wharton is a great analyst and satirist of the ruling classes in America at the turn of the century and her heart was in the right place as she gets this novel going with a long section about a mill worker barely injured in an industrial accident and the “fruitless” attempt by a one of managers at the mill, who hopes through a lot of (wasted) anguish trying to get the mill to improve worker safety and, in the broader sense, improve their lives. Good start - but then the novel drifts away from this central and important theme. We’ve got a mixed potion here: one big part Dickens/Zola/Sinclair about worker exploitation, grim exposes; another part is pure Middlemarch, and nothing wrong with that but it feels almost like a copy  - young woman struggling bring better life top her community against a backdrop of marital mismatches, and that’s still good, but we also get a strong dose to top it off of Henry James, long passages hard to work out way through and most significant is that the narrative itself is agonizingly slow - and Wharton is not as good as James here, as we just want to kick the tires and get this vehicle on the move. I’ve read halfway through - 300 pp! - and it seems as if what I’ve read could well have been told a third of that or even less, and at last I’mleft with the feeling that there’s much to like in this novel but it really  had to be moving along faster, like most of EW’s work, and it needs more satire, more edge, more commitment as in the first (promising) section and, though I hate to say it, this novel needs more clarity: EW is particularly inept about cluing us in on who’s doing the speaking, who are these characters whom we’d met 200 pp back and no longer remember, what are so many of the names similar for God’s sake: At least let the main characters have names that don’t start w/ the same letter, is that too much to ask? Start reading if you dare, I’m sure I missed or misread some things, but good luck at finishing. 

I’ve liked some of Paul Auster’s work, especially his ability to capture the mood of upper Manhattan West Side in the 70s and 80s - this in part because I lived there for a short time and I, too, have tried to capture the era but with much less success. His 1993 novel, Leviathan, coves this same ground but in my view via a vast exploration of character - a contemporary of the the narrator (who is clearly autobiographical) with many nuances and quirks and obsessions. We learn in the first sentence that a young man died in a bomb explosion in Wisconsin and that the Auster-like narrator survives it’s his friend Sachs. (Some students died in a lab bomb explosion in Wisconsin in this era, which many have inspired this death.) I have to say, though, that after the initial sketching in of character the novel is a long, to me tedious account of this Sachs’s life and obsessions with many side trips that tell of the narrator’s sexual prowess and confidence (and his waning writing abilities and his break-up of marriage) - and I wish it could be more engaging but well than half-way through I was getting no enjoyment or enlightenment by further reading: it’s a novel of character, sure, but it’s also a novel devoid of plot: Why not further investigation, for ex., into the unsolved bombing death, and how could the narrator be the only one to know who built that bomb? Where’s the FBI in all this?  hate dictating what a novel should have or could have been but at least I expect to be entertained and engaged start to finish but with this one the engagement diminished rather than expanded or deepened and I have in at about the half-way point, sorry.