"You've had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome."

So says Mrs. Hale, the source of the few facts of the story that the narrator concocts about Ethan Frome, and so say I.

I first read Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton, during the last millennium and, along with millions of other high-school students, remember it for the depression into which it flung me as I faced page after page of unrelenting misery that Wharton inflicted upon her title character. I probably callously thought then what I callously thought on my latest reread of this American classic, "Ethan Frome couldn't even succeed at killing himself and his lover as she asked him to."

Callousness aside, I have spent the last six weeks scratching my head trying to figure out why I would sign up to review Ethan Frome for the Classics Circuit's Edith Wharton tour when I had no good memories of reading this book and whenever I mentioned to someone what I was reading they invariably moaned and rolled their eyes and questioned my sanity. But, it is an American classic and I couldn't really remember how the story worked and I've matured a lot since I was 16, so after having a jolly good time with Murder at Longbourn I dived into Ethan Frome last week, and I'm glad I did.

It is beautifully written--exquisite prose, finely crafted, and a true expression of an American tragedy. It is compelling too. I found myself thinking of Hamlet a lot whilst reading it, and I forced myself to slow down and not chug it but to savor it and think about and feel the unfolding inevitability of the catastrophe.

I've also been slowly reading Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree, and in it he says that "some books are badly written...sometimes they're badly read, too." Ethan Frome is beautifully written but more often than not it's badly read, hence the almost universal loathing it inspires. I think it's a mistake to inhale it--though I think many people, especially students who must read it for a class, are tempted to because it's short (i.e., inhalable) and depressing (i.e., "let's just get it over with!")--because it does have a lot to like.

I found that I enjoyed reading this book when I limited the experience to just three or four chapters a night--and they are short chapters--and then turning to another book for balance. I read Shakespeare, especially the tragedies, this way too.

In thinking about what to write about for this post, I googled on "tragedy" and liked this opening sentence from the Wikipedia entry:

Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that paradoxically offers its audience pleasure...

I think our society tends to shy away from stories that don't have happy endings. I imagine Hollywood types discussing the "box-office poison" of tragedy--maybe that's why reality-show contests are so popular. In addition to being cheaper to produce than regular dramas, they do guarantee a happy ending for at least someone or some team. A tragedy is a guarantee that that there is no happy ending--the art lies in telling the story in a way that makes it pleasurable for the reader.

In the case of Ethan Frome, it is not the message but the medium that makes the story a classic. It is not that Wharton shows the dark underbelly of the American dream--although I thought it was interesting that Ethan thought of "going west" as a way of escaping the prison of his life in Starkfield--but that you can read this horrific tale of thwarted dreams and forbidden desire and appreciate and enjoy the beautifully wrought story arc, the layered, interwoven imagery of light and incarceration, and the metaphor of the seasons, from the dead mid-winter of discontent to the remembered heat of August to the false spring that ends the story.

I couldn't help wonder where Wharton's head was when she wrote this story--it was published in 1911, she divorced 1913. I found this on womenwriters.net: "Wharton was divorced from her husband in 1913, in part because she and her husband had grown into separate lives, and in part because her husband had numerous infidelities." Two years after she thwarted Ethan's escape from the shackles of his marriage, she affected her own escape.

A few years ago I listened to a series of lectures from The Teaching Company that were delivered by Elizabeth Vandiver, and I remember her saying that punishments in Greek mythology were particularly appropriate to the crime. I have to say that Wharton provided Ethan with a particularly appropriate punishment to his crime of lusting after his wife's cousin by having her become as querulous as his wife. Of course to be fair, Mattie did sustain a spinal injury which might excuse a certain amount of peevishness on her part over a twenty-year period.

In my opening paragraph, I mentioned that the narrator concocts the story of Ethan Frome from the few facts he gets from the inhabitants of Starkfield about Ethan. I read Atonement about six months ago and wrote a bit about the unreliability of narrators, Briony in particular, and how the story of Celia and Robbie is really more about Briony than Celia and Robbie. I got to thinking about Atonement again whilst thinking about Ethan Frome because it struck me that the story of Ethan Frome is more about the unnamed narrator who fills in the huge gaps between the facts with his own fantasy than it is about Ethan and Mattie and Zenobia.

In doing a bit of reading about Ethan Frome, I have discovered that Wharton wrote a companion piece to it, Summer. Since I read Ethan Frome in January, maybe I'll put Summer on my list for July.



In looking for an image of the version that I read, I found quite a few versions out there...most have similar covers--the one on the Signet Classic version I read is a Grandma Moses painting, but I thought this one was the most out of the norm! Kind of gives away the whole story on the cover.


There's also a fairly recent movie adaptation with Liam Neeson as Ethan. Not sure whether I'll watch it or not.

Atonement: Novel within a Novel

I enjoyed both the novel and movie immensely after putting them off for so long, but I still am struggling with how I feel about the ending. I'm hoping that writing this post will clarify my thoughts. Ready for a ramble?

I found the double ending and the shift to first-person narrator in the last part to be intriguing but unsettling. I thought of Hamlet and the play-within-a-play when I realized that Atonement is a novel within a novel. The next question I asked myself was whether McEwan also intended to use this literary device "to catch the conscience of the king" as Hamlet did.

The double ending certainly drives home the point that the story is a fiction, created by a godlike author, who can create a happy ending or a sad ending or a bittersweet, bleak, or hopeful ending. It also underscores beautifully the novel's theme of truthfulness and the fallibility of one's own perception. Readers depend on authors to tell them true stories, especially if those stories are fiction, but authors can only tell the truth as they perceive it at any given time.

Initially, I admired the artistic aspect of the double-ending and the novel within the novel, but on a purely visceral level found the experience jarring. I felt a bit as if the rug had been pulled out from under me. Hearing or reading stories fills a hole in my psyche--Atonement, because of its structure, didn't do that. When I finished the book, I felt a bit hollow, cheated, and confused--I wanted my happy ending back! The disconcerting part is that I also felt like I had just read a terrific book, and it's taken awhile to figure out how I could feel disappointed and impressed at the same time.

Watching the movie helped. I felt that the first part of the movie, which matches the first part of the book--i.e., the time at the Tallis's home in England--was probably the most faithful adaptation of a book I have ever encountered. It was almost as if the book provided the screenplay, that the screenwriter simply transposed one to the other. True, a bit of the backstory was missing--particularly that of Jack Tallis's philandering in London rather than coming home--but it wasn't really missed.

Harriet Walter as Emily Tallis was picture perfect--the headache-prone, upper-class matron who is more part of the problem than part of the solution. I think this might be my favorite role for Keira Knightley (i.e., as Cecelia Tallis) and James McAvoy as Robbie Turner was terrific. Saoirse Ronan as 13-year old Briony Tallis was much grimmer than I had imagined her in the book, but I quickly came to see that she played it with an eye towards how the 18-year old Briony was, and then it gelled for me. Benedict Cumberbatch and Juno Temple as Paul Marshall and Lola Quincy were both truly creepy--I was a bit surprised when I first saw Temple, but she worked for me as Lola.

The second part of the movie, that which follows Robbie on his voyage across France to Dunkirk, was far less faithful to the book in scenes though I think it did a good job of capturing the tone and horror and dislocation of war along with Paul's developing fever. I'm not sure that I would have understood this part of the movie at all if I hadn't read the book. So much of it was surreal, with flashbacks and hallucinations, that pinning it to a historical event would have been pretty challenging had I just watched the movie. I also kept on waiting for the German planes to attack them along the way, and was surprised when they reached Dunkirk without diving under trucks to escape strafing. That was such a big part of the book that I'm surprised they didn't include even one attack.

The final part of the movie digressed most from the book in that Briony's birthday party and the enactment of her first and only play, The Trials of Arabella, were completely left out. Instead, Vanessa Redgrave as the aged Briony, gives an interview and in so doing the novel becomes a novel within a novel. I think the screenwriter/director made the right choice here as the return to the Tallis house and the enactment of the play would have taken too much time for roughly the same affect--i.e., focusing on Briony's obligations as an author who is yearning for atonement.

However, the interview scene doesn't include one aspect of Briony's decision not to publish her novel, Atonement, sooner--the book makes it clear that she can't publish it while Paul and Lola Marshall are still alive, rich, and powerful. In the middle section of the movie, Briony (stoically played by Romola Garai)realizes that Robbie's name can never be cleared because once Lola is married to Paul she can't/won't testify against him. In the book, Briony waits to publish until after Paul has died. In the movie, no explanation is given for her waiting so long to publish the novel that is supposed to set the record straight.

This all leads back to the main question--does Briony ever really atone for what she did? I have to say no. As a child, she told a lie because she couldn't comprehend the truth. As an author, she told a lie when she changed the ending of Cecelia and Robbie's story. She said that she was trying to give Cecelia and Robbie the happy ending that her initial lie had robbed them of, but by changing the ending of their story she robbed them once. Once again, she's more concerned with herself (i.e., feeling that she has given them something back that she prevented) than the truth of their lives.

Initially, I felt sympathy for Briony when she is a nurse. The only time I cried during the book or movie was when she consoles the dying French man in the hospital, and at that point I felt that I could forgive her for everything. Upon reflection, however, I think the discomfort I felt at the end of the book is actually anger towards her. As a novelist, Briony has an obligation to tell the truth as she knows it. That's all a writer can do--that, and admitting when the truth eludes us. But to alter a story, to knowingly tell a false story, is wrong. It gets muddy here but the point I want to stress is that I believe there are true fictional stories and false ones. McEwan wrote a true story about a writer, Briony Tallis, who wrote false stories.

Good book. Good movie.