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Suzanne

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Suzanne is Currently Reading

Suzanne is currently reading

The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton (1994-04-28)

by Edith Wharton

bookshelves: currently-reading, book-club-pvld

Reading for the 2nd time

read in March 2012

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Suzanne said: " This is a love story. It’s also about how people will justify and rationalize what they need to do to survive, although survival is a relative term.

Nick and Susy Lansing, newlyweds in the early 1920s, are certainly in love, which makes the premise o This is a love story. It’s also about how people will justify and rationalize what they need to do to survive, although survival is a relative term.

Nick and Susy Lansing, newlyweds in the early 1920s, are certainly in love, which makes the premise of the book a little weird but more compelling. Both have always relied on the generosity of well-to-do friends to keep them in the kind of society they feel they have to be a part of. As hangers-on at the fringes of the ‘20s equivalent of the jet-set, they are dependent on both the material largesse of the rich folk and also on the good-will that keeps the goodies coming. They feel stuck, even though they have contempt for the materialism and philistinism of said so-called friends. Lest Nick and Susy sound too phony and awful, they really are quite likeable characters. The best part of the story for me was watching them confront the moral ambiguities their desired lifestyle required, while they grappled with the belief that they lacked the resources to acquire any other imaginably acceptable alternative.

Nick, the aspiring writer, “had never had more than a pittance” and that was gone. His writing, he knew, would never pay the bills. So Nick and Susy have made a pact prior to their marriage, a very practical solution to their problem: they will stay married until one or both can find a better arrangement, then they will release each other for their mutual good. How modern! Both are popular with the monied set and they accept honeymoon digs from various people so that they can spend a year together before putting their plan into effect.

As their honeymoon progresses, it becomes apparent that whatever slippery moral slope they are on, their footholds may be in different places, and they need to reconcile that. The rest of the book is spent chronicling from their alternating points of view a series of miscommunications, misinterpretations, and assumptions about what the other is up to or what the other wants that threatens to tear them apart prematurely or unnecessarily. There’s some amusing stuff here such as the irony in Susy’s thinking: she wishes she had money, so she wouldn’t have to be so shallow and hang out with these people who have it, and for whom she has no respect, in order to have enough money to hang out with them.

Susy also wants a good life for her husband because she loves him; he wants her to not have to compromise their principles (such as they are) for his sake. There are minor characters too whose plights highlight certain moral questions in relation to money and the power it brings. Carol Hicks, a clear-sighted and pragmatic friend of Nick’s from a nouveau riche American family, recognizes that to marry a titled prince would bestow on her freedom of one sort while depriving her of another. Susy’s friend Shref inspires in her a repugnance of his ethics even while she recognizes that her complicity in certain affairs makes it hard to accuse him of bad behavior.

The settings cross several continents and afford a view to the good life in the 1920’s: a Venetian palace, a villa on Lake Como, yachts cruising the Aegean, Parisian dressmaker shops (these people don’t buy off the rack), fashionable hotels and restaurants in London and Rome.

Along the way we see some real growth of morals and maturity in Susy and Nick, while being caught up in the suspense of what will happen to the two of them, either separately or together. This is not at all a heavy-handed moral treatise or preachy story, but an entertaining one that had me rooting for the characters. Of course, the writing is wonderful and the book much less depressing than some of Wharton’s other works. Thoroughly enjoyed this. ...more "

progress: On page 247. "Edith Wharton rocks" — Mar 01, 2012 08:09PM

14 hours, 58 min ago · see review

Suzanne is currently reading

Nine Inches

by Tom Perrotta

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(page 164 of 246)
— 15 hours, 0 min ago

Jun 04, 2026 08:41AM

Suzanne is currently reading

Prize Stories 1991: The O. Henry Awards (The O. Henry Prize Collection)

by William Abrahams

bookshelves: currently-reading, short-story

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(page 266 of 448)
— May 31, 2026 03:02PM

Dec 20, 2025 09:21AM

Suzanne’s Quotes

“Cats are not adoring like dogs. They don’t care. They can never be relied upon to shore up a human ego. They go their way, do their thing, are not subservient and will never apologise. No one has ever come across a cat apologising and if a cat did, it would patently be obvious it was not being sincere.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

69 likes

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch of chuckleheads.”
― William Styron

tags: writing

19 likes

“And maybe that was love. The body’s chemical reaction to finding a person who irritates you less than everyone else.”
― JoAnn Chaney, As Long as We Both Shall Live

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“In the end, though, freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear. Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.”
― Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

24 likes