Ever since I finished The Age of Innocence a couple years ago (which I plan to reread), I've been meaning to start on The House of Mirth. But for some reason I haven't spotted it in any of the bookstores here, so I'm going ahead with Ethan Frome. So far I've been surprised by Wharton's prose here, which is deliberately simple, since this is a sharply etched portrait of the simple folks in a 19th century New England village. The sentences are measured and haunting, and at certain points, even sparse. They also go hand-in-hand with the mute, melancholy landscape of Starkfield (even the name of the town suggests the town's character).
The Age of Innocence, on the other hand, wasn't set in a remote village, so naturally its language should be different compared to that in Ethan Frome. In Innocence, Wharton contemplates Old New York: the truly old and established hierarchy in that vanished social era. I remember being wowed by her elaborate descriptions of the stage handling of social habits and rituals in upper-middle-class New York society (the proper time for after-dinner calls, the proper liquids to serve the guests, the gardenia in the lapel, etc). And yet none of these details seemed frivolous, either. They all contributed to the world of the novel.
Anyway, hopefully I'll finish Ethan Frome soon. I'll probably post more excerpts from it too.
