Matthew's review
The Age of Innocence (Oxford World's Classics)
by Edith Wharton
Matthew's review
The Age of Innocence (Oxford World's Classics) by Edith Wharton
Matthew's review
rating:
This is a gorgeous book with some great characters and a special ambience that I haven't experienced in any other novel. Edith Wharton takes the reader deep inside the strange little world of upper-class late 19th century New York, detailing the manners, the attitudes, the rules, the institutionalized hypocrisy, the spectacular beauty and superficiality, and most of all, the lies that everyone must tell themselves and those around them to survive in a tightly regimented culture that has just barely reached its zenith and is already in decline.
Wharton's protagonist, Newland Archer, is one of the best written male characters I've ever come across. Her insightful portrayal is so steeped in the nuances of the masculine dilemma that it's hard to believe she was never a man. At the same time, her writing is effortlessly sensual and poetic without any of the arrhythmia or excessive floweriness that I find often characterizes Victorian writing.
Both times I read this book (at 17 &...more
Wharton's protagonist, Newland Archer, is one of the best written male characters I've ever come across. Her insightful portrayal is so steeped in the nuances of the masculine dilemma that it's hard to believe she was never a man. At the same time, her writing is effortlessly sensual and poetic without any of the arrhythmia or excessive floweriness that I find often characterizes Victorian writing.
Both times I read this book (at 17 &...more
