February report

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the Report. If I look back on the first one from where I am today, I see how much has changed and how much has remained constant. Is that what life is? Maybe!

Well, I hope you still enjoy reading the Report as much as I enjoy writing it!1

What I read in February:

Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)2—As noted in Reports of yore, there is little I like more than reading a book set in a place I am visiting. I am lucky that Book Club also shares this interest. Thus, for our annual Retreat—this year taking place in the Berkshires—it was only logical that we would choose one of the most legendary/notorious New England novels of all time.

Why notorious? It had a bad reputation for being boring when I was in high school. I didn’t read it for the first time until college and when I did I was like:

Because it’s the opposite of boring! It’s literally Wharton inventing the genre of romance.3 Reading it now, I do see why teens might find the beginning a little slow. A little relentlessly small town and quotidian. But me? I can’t get enough of a gossipy frame narrative or of a wintry mountain village with cold New Englanders whose icy exteriors can mask burning passions.

I think we might already know I’m not one to read romance. But I’m also one to read pretty much almost anything Wharton wrote. And as I listened to this novel while tooling around upstate, I remembered the college class where I first encountered Wharton. It was also where I learned—and I will never fact-check this memory because the trivia is just too good—that Wharton actually did invent the imagery of kissing as fireworks.4 She genuinely and truly knew how create an incredibly written page-turner.

And I get why, at least in my time, teachers assigned this book to high schoolers. The setting is so pivotal to the narrative, to the characters themselves. The foreshadowing is heavy but not overhanded. The ethical dilemma at the heart of the novel—should he stay with his emotionally abusive and chronically ill wife or should he send his wife’s orphaned cousin off to the wolves of the city—what would you do if you were Ethan Frome?

In many ways, this is a book about how sometimes life sucks. For Ethan Frome, whose adulthood was spent as a caregiver to his ailing parents and then his “sick”5 wife, he’s “had an awful mean time,” as one character puts it, and is looking forward to a future of more of the same during the time he has to choose between staying with his wife or running away with his wife’s cousin. I thought I remembered how it ended but I didn’t. And I won’t spoil it here, but I will say that the ending is one example of why I fell in love with modernism. The ending is enough to make you wonder what the book is actually really about or, more like, how deep do the layers of misery in small-town life go? As if having an objectively hard life wasn’t enough, imagine how hard it could be to live with the consequences of your actions and to stay living in the place where everyone knows the details of your shame and where, if you catch someone on the right day, they’re willing to gossip about it with a total stranger whom you’ve been helping out for the past week!!

What I’m looking forward to reading in March:

Helen Oyeyemi, Parasol Against the Axe (March)

Lauren Oyler, No Judgment: Essays (March)