Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome was once an optimistic young man but no more.  What do you expect from living in a place called Starkfield?  Far away from the New York City setting that Edith Wharton often wrote of, Ethan Frome is set in a very rural, very brutal, very cold land.

We first meet Ethan Frome as a literal wreck of a man, crippled by a horrible accident years ago.  The townsfolk seem to know something about it but aren’t real talkative.  The story then flashes back so we start learning what happened.  More importantly we learn why it happened as we watch him live a life of misery.  Playing his life by the rules doesn’t seem to work for Ethan.  His duty to his family kept him from his education and the world at large.  His sense of obligation led him to an unwise marriage.  His wife keeps him from happiness and love.  So what happened?  Similar to The Age of Innocence (which we read earlier) there is the introduction of another woman who has some loose family relation, has fallen on hard times and lives in the shadow of some sort of scandal…and she’s wonderful!  Ethan is able to look past her faults (and she does have some) and see everything he’s had to give up now in arm’s reach.

The girl was more than the bright serviceable creature he had thought her.  She had an eye to see and an ear to hear:  he could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will.

Like many of the books we read, this does not end well.  Not at all well.  I would discuss it more but I really don’t want to give anything away.

Ethan Frome is a very easy book to read, almost like a short story.  Since it is brief, everything that happens takes on more significance than in a longer book.  Pay attention while you read.  It translates well one hundred years after it was written, much better than The Age of Innocence.   Where that story dealt with many of society’s rules and expectations, Ethan Frome deals more directly with a theme of basic human needs. Even if the working class doesn’t have as many rules as high society, it certainly has just as many problems.

Apparently nobody wrote about contemporary working class people in that day and Ethan Frome was met with some criticism not just for the content of the book but the cast of characters.  Who wants to read about the working poor as real human beings?

Ethan Frome is a very good book.