I begin the year with matters
of the heart – not bad!Edith Wharton’s
romantic novel starts with two lovers enjoying a moonlit night. The moon – a
romantic orb, a lover’s muse! Lovers make of the moon what they want to – a
comparison, a resemblance, a poem, a sonnet. Its beauty is safe at a distance –
an object to marvel and awe upon, guarded from a likelihood to lose its luster
from proximity and accessibility.
Ediith Wharton is one
of those writers I have come to respect a lot because of her comprehension of
people’s hearts and minds and for her effortless
articulation of subtleties in their thoughts, words, behavior and mannerisms.
In her stories, she gently rips apart veils of correctness and exposes the
endless lines of scruples. The ‘Age of innocence’ and ‘House of mirth’ are two
of my favourite books. She is as articulate in this one, laying bare the
confusions and distortions in the heads and hearts of both sexes but somehow I
didn’t find it as captivating as the earlier two reads.
It is probably because the characters, for
what they are and definitely not for the way they are penned down, didn’t quite
appeal to me. Rather, it won’t be untrue if I said I despised most of them. The
protagonist couple Suzy and Nick Lansing, living off the affluent, privileged
and elitist society, is not the kind I really look up to or hold in high regard
– I’d rather reason out for a murderer. And it becomes preposterously tedious
when this parasitic appeasing lot, sponging on high society, reveals a moral
spine and a mind of its own. Nothing wrong with having your own values,
whatever they might be, but it takes an ugly form when one attempts to be the
head and the tail at the same time, to one’s benefit.
Suzy and Nick have
lived their separate lives in such proud servitude and now when they each have
found the rebellious other, they enter into a frivolous marriage – a
contractual one, a pact unshackling the tethers the institution of marriage is
generally associated with. Their elite friends have decided to help the couple
live off their fortunes for a year and make their houses available to them in
turns.
But there are no free
lunches, there never were, especially with the rich, especially for the not so
rich – the dependents. The privileged need playthings to while their time with,
to feel important, to have them listened to and at times to hide their dirty
laundry, and the poor appeasers are obliged to keep their secrets for them – a
payment in kind for the privileges they are bestowed upon with. Not everyone
thinks it to be an obligation though, not Nick! And when he finds his wife
think of her conniving with her benefactor to keep the benefactor’s illicit
affair an obligatory repayment, he is appalled by the thought and loses no time
to abandon her with an urgency, in the very second month of their marriage.
What follows, as they
go back to blending into the rich colours of the elite society, is their
individual struggles to find out if it was love in the first place and a series
of events that allow them to question themselves about their values and actions
in the midst of a society marked by money, privileges, selfishness and
authority. Can one have the best of both worlds? – the cunning and shameless
can, I suppose. But do Nick and Suzy continue with what they think is right or
what is right? And what is right, anyway? To own up has never been easy – to
own up your love, your mistakes, your immoralities, your imperfect thoughts
because we twist our values to what suits us at that point in time; we convince
ourselves of it.
The story also
highlights the fact that in a demanding situation, most of the times one ends
up thinking and acting for the other person – speaking is an option but it
often turns into an onerous task and the silence, open to a multitude of
interpretations, ultimately makes it even worse.
In the end, I did
soften a lot towards Suzy. I would have shaken hands with them both for what
they finally did and the way they did it. A little unbelievable, but then
that’s romance for you. Half way through the book though, I was only pleading out
of impatience and boredom – okay tell me the end, let’s just finish this
quickly, whichever way it goes; I had started caring less for the characters.
My rating: 6/10
Image copyrights:
Book cover -
https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/product/the-glimpses-of-the-moon-edith-wharton-first-edition-rare/
Edith Wharton -
https://www.famousauthors.org/edith-wharton
