Well, I'll be...
Miss Wharton did not follow Cormac down the trash chute. I kept at it in fits and starts and finished it in a hurried flourish, to fit the book's hurried finish, this afternoon.
Well, I'll be...It was pretty darned good! Did not end in stereotyped fashion as it had begun and as I feared it would continue. Ended completely surprisingly, realistically surprisingly, like A Farewell to Arms, the ending did not feel stiltedly surprising.
The society of "Old New York," preposterously so-called even then, in the book's setting, in the 1870's, is taken as scrupulously authentic as drawn by Miss Wharton, as only it could be by one as Miss Wharton, born a Jones, of the family that gave rise to the saying, "Keeping up with the Joneses," not drawn purely from "imagination" as Nabokov said English aristocratic society was by Dickens in Bleak House--"What did he know of English aristocratic society?"--Nabokov the Russian apparently knowing English society, but how authentic an imagination Dickens had of Old English aristocracy at least as imagined by Old New York, as Lady Dedlock could have stepped right into The Age of Innocence and stepped out of it realistically as Madame Olenska did not as preposterously as she did in Bleak House but what did Dickens know of Old New York anyway.
Miss Wharton did not follow Cormac down the trash chute. I kept at it in fits and starts and finished it in a hurried flourish, to fit the book's hurried finish, this afternoon.
Well, I'll be...It was pretty darned good! Did not end in stereotyped fashion as it had begun and as I feared it would continue. Ended completely surprisingly, realistically surprisingly, like A Farewell to Arms, the ending did not feel stiltedly surprising.
The society of "Old New York," preposterously so-called even then, in the book's setting, in the 1870's, is taken as scrupulously authentic as drawn by Miss Wharton, as only it could be by one as Miss Wharton, born a Jones, of the family that gave rise to the saying, "Keeping up with the Joneses," not drawn purely from "imagination" as Nabokov said English aristocratic society was by Dickens in Bleak House--"What did he know of English aristocratic society?"--Nabokov the Russian apparently knowing English society, but how authentic an imagination Dickens had of Old English aristocracy at least as imagined by Old New York, as Lady Dedlock could have stepped right into The Age of Innocence and stepped out of it realistically as Madame Olenska did not as preposterously as she did in Bleak House but what did Dickens know of Old New York anyway.
