Summer Reading #3: Edith Wharton, ETHAN FROME

Edith Wharton: Author. Society matron. Inventor of Seasonal Affective Disorder?

A stranger comes to a small town in Massachusetts and meets the sad and disfigured Ethan Frome, of whom a wise local says, "Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters." Does he have a tragic past? Oh, does he!

Book-long flashback: Ethan is a poor farmer and the light of his life is a fresh flower of youth named Mattie Silver, who unfortunately is also his disabled wife Zenobia's caretaker. (That's how he met his wife as well; she came to nurse his ailing mother and he couldn't bear to see her leave. Sir, you have a type!) Ethan and Zeena haven't been happy for ages, but predictably she is Not Pleased to see her husband do things for Mattie, like finish her chores or shave regularly. As the song goes, it's tough to have a crush. Then one day, Zeena goes to the doctor a few towns over...

I figured I wouldn't take to ETHAN FROME because of its rural setting, but the difference between Ethan Frome and the similarly torn Newland Archer isn't geography, it's money. The cold hand of poverty clamps around this threesome and squeezes. Ethan dreamed of entering a trade once, but then his parents went crazy and he had to take care of them, and then his wife got sick; we're told he isn't a good farmer and she's a spendthrift. Newland can buy distance from Madame Olenska with livery cabs and European tours, but there's no getting away for Ethan; at the end of the day, he still has to come back to the same house as Mattie. (And she can't afford to go either, her father having died and left the family so destitute she was forced to sell her piano.)

At one point Ethan passes a graveyard with Mattie and is comforted by the thought that she will eventually lie there beside him when they're both dead. A graveyard. It's a remarkable passage, but that's not Puritan, that's downright medieval.

I didn't really enjoy this book, but I am glad I read it, and not just for the score-settling. I hadn't specifically planned to read it in the summer, but it helped with the bleakness factor. (Incidentally, and perhaps inappropriately, if you are feeling a Frome-ish level of dissatisfaction with your life, please get help. Life is too short to live in Starkfield.) When I returned it to the library I found a collection of Wharton short stories set in New York, which I think will suit me better.