Just finished listening to a librivox.org reading of Edith Wharton's House of Mirth.  Considered on of the first novels of manners, Mirth charts the course of a woman, Lily Bart, as she falls from a comfortable position in New York society. 

Read by a single reader (sort of a rarity within the crowd-sourcing melieu that is librivox), Mirth had me completely wrapped up. 

How wrapped up?  Wrapped up like driving in the car with with this expression on my face. 

What Wharton managed to do was tell a story in which no one does a thing to harm any one else but the landscape is littered with corpses anyway.  This is due, in no small part, to the kind of inside knowledge of "polite society" that she enjoyed.  Writing from the inside, she delivers observation and commentary in perfect measure, never once succombing to the urge to editorialize.  We see Wharton's characters as they would see each other.

Altogether, an amazing read and a great way to start off the reading/listening year.  I'd used librivox to listen to another Wharton books -- The Age of Innocence -- and while it felt a little more like a Gilded Age melodrama, Wharton's ear for dialogue and the secret conversations hiding in plain sight made it a great story as well.

Someday, when I get to go back to college, I would love to do some work that examined the dystopian side of the American dream.  It would involve a critical reading of Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Drieser and Edith Wharton to see what similarities existed between their three worldviews. 

Specifically, it would delve into the psychology of the striver -- the individual who wants to advance him- or herself within a social contruct -- and how "Old Money" responded to the striver during the period between the end of the Civil War and the First World War.  There's something facinating to me in the way literature documented how Money responded to the rising middle class during this time.  Further, that set of assumptions and behaviors seems to have direct analogues in the ways that we (Americans) treat and view the rest of the world as power (geopolitical, financial) shifts from our hands into those of "upstarts" like China, India and Malaysia.

Whether my dissertation ever sees the light of day, House of Mirth is a hell of a story and easily deserves its vaunted position as one of America's "important" books.  Too bad there aren't books groups out there that reconsider old works instead of muddling about with crap like The Westfalian Cheese Ladies' Literature and Harmony Club Explains It All to You Over Cups of Tea in Urkutsk.

Thanks for reading.