"The Age of Innocence", Edith Wharton (1921)

Title: The Age of Innocence
Author: Edith Wharton
Published:1920
Recommendation: Read it!
If you like: The Classics, Intimate Portrayals of Relationships, Love Stories, Sad Stories
Reminds me of: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Emma by Jane Austen


This is a story about love and duty, about the choices we make and the way we let others make choices for us, about the life we have and the life we could have, if only we’d reach out and take it.  It’s beautiful and heartbreaking and well worth a read.

Newland Archer is a young man in the prime of his life.  He’s a member of the upper echelon of New York society and he’s about to be married to May, the most beautiful and sought-after girl of the season.  On the same night that their betrothal is announced, he meets her cousin, Ellen Olenska.  And so it begins.

At first I was skeptical – yet another Pulitzer about an incredibly wealthy, urban man?  Really?  I thought the Pulitzers were supposed to be awarded to books that told the American story.  Color me a populist, but I’m starting to feel like something is missing here.  But I’ll have to put aside my criticism of the Pulitzer committee for now.  This might not be the representative American story, but it’s such a wonderful story that I don’t mind.

The Archers and all the other families in New York society live by strict codes.  Nothing is said outright, but they all understand each other: everything they say has a hidden meaning and everyone follows their codes so religiously that the hidden meanings are clear.  But some things can never even be hinted at – anything too unpleasant must be put aside.  As the narrator describes early in the book during a conversation between Archer and his mother: “it was against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever allude to what was uppermost in their thoughts.”  Archer’s betrothed, May, follows these codes completely – she is the “perfect” woman.  But he begins to see that there may not be anything else at all underneath her perfect exterior.

Archer feels different from his fellow men, and he wants to push back against these strict rules of behavior.  As his relationship with Ellen develops, he feels both more desirous of breaking free and more hemmed in and unable to escape than ever before.  His life is inevitable and he feels unable to act according to his own free will.  His feeble attempts continue to fall short.

Archer and Ellen meet in society and catch spare moments alone in hallways or Opera boxes.  They fall in love in an innocent way and neither sees it happening.  But to the reader it feels so real.  In one scene, when they are seeing each other after a separation, Archer is struck anew by everything that Ellen is.  He says to her “Each time you happen to me all over again.”  This is what love feels like.  To capture that in a novel is what makes reading such a pleasure.  And this novel is a pleasure, indeed.

Mindfulness Exercises: Leave No Trace

This week’s exercise was to “leave no trace”: when you’re done using a room in the house, clean it up so that there is no trace that you have been there.

This exercise was a little bit harder for me.  The kitchen would have been nearly impossible.  Every time I open the dishwasher Adeline comes racing over from wherever she is and starts pulling out plates and knives and trying to climb inside.  Same goes for opening cabinets or drawers.  So, needless to say, cleaning the kitchen is somewhat of a process.  So to make it a little easier on myself I chose the family room.  Every time I left the room I tried to pick up – straighten the couch cushions, fold the blankets, etc. 

One of the lessons that Jan draws from this exercise is the way that a clean space helps us feel more at ease in our mind.  As a mess builds up it annoys us because it’s messy and we know we’ll have to clean it, but it also makes our whole inner life seem a little bit messier and more difficult to deal with.  I have definitely noticed in the past that I feel better when I get the house cleaned up.  And when I’m upset about something just the act of cleaning up can make me feel better.  This exercise shows how connected we are not only to the people around us, but to the things and the places as well.

The other thing I noticed this week was my tendency to narrate.  Even while intentionally doing a mindfulness exercise, I often begin to narrate my actions or even plan for what I will say about them when I’m done.  This was a continuing problem for me in my previous mindfulness group.  My teacher told me that I was one step closer to mindfulness, but still miles away.  At least my mind wasn’t who knows where, thinking about what happened last week or things I needed to get done later that day.  But to narrate your mindfulness is not to be mindful.  I definitely need to work on that.

And now for this week’s exercise:

“Filler Words: Become aware of the use of ‘filler’ words and phrases and try to eliminate them from your speech.”

"The Magnificent Ambersons", Booth Tarkington (1919)

Honestly, I didn’t think this book was that great.  I had a couple problems with it, but the biggest problem was that I pretty much hated the protagonist: Georgie Amberson Minafer.  You’re supposed to hate him – he’s an arrogant, self-centered, stuck-up little rich boy who grows into an intolerable young man.  I understand why the author needed us to hate him, and I have seen unsympathetic protagonists work, but I just didn’t think it was very successful here.  The plot is slow to develop, so you spend the first half of the book just reading about the annoying antics of this character that you loathe.  And there aren’t really any other good characters to take the sting out of it.  The rest of his family is just as bad in their own way.  And the only characters who seem like they might be likable become unlikable as soon as you meet them because they like Georgie.  You just want to scream – why do you people like this guy?!

The plot finally does start to pick up around half-way through and at least at that point I was interested to keep reading to see what happens.  But it’s just painful and no fun to read through.  Again, you spend a lot of time screaming at the characters – don’t let him do this to you!  But they do.  There is finally some satisfaction towards the end when Georgie finally gets his “come-uppance” in the form of the downfall of the old family (it’s pretty clear from the back of the book that this will happen, and very clearly foreshadowed early on, so this isn’t really a “spoiler”).  But by that point so many lives have been ruined that you don’t even really care anymore.

It is the downfall of the family that makes this book a social commentary, and I suppose why it was chosen for the Pulitzer.  The Ambersons were indeed magnificent, but by the end of the book they have fallen into ruin and new families have taken their place.  This “new money” society is built by men of industry who actually do things, like build cars.  Cars have a major role in the book – cars become more popular, their use spreads and the city grows just as the Ambersons, with their horse-drawn carriages and big lawns, decline.  The city becomes so big that no one cares about the Ambersons anymore.  By the time Georgie gets his “come-uppance” the people who were waiting for it don’t even remember that they were waiting anymore.

Mindfulness Exercises: Use Your Nondominant Hand

 This week I did my first mindfulness exercise from the book How to Train a Wild Elephant: I tried to use my nondominant hand for some ordinary tasks throughout the day.

I actually do a lot more things with my left hand than I ever did before because I’m often holding Adeline in my right hand and I have to use my left hand.  So I tried to notice when I did those things and take a moment to be mindful.  I was relatively successful.  I would say I noticed at least a few times a day.  I also tried to do things with my left hand that even now I would still use my right hand.  Most challenging was trying to eat or brush my teeth left-handed. 

I actually found brushing my teeth left-handed to be incredibly difficult.  Through doing this exercise I discovered that I have a very precise tooth-brushing method (I’m hoping everyone does this, or maybe I’m just a little OCD?) and I could not do it properly with my left-hand – not even remotely.  I would end up brushing my teeth left-handed for about a minute, and then switch to the right hand and just start all over again.  (I guess that’s the OCD again.)

I also tried writing left-handed.  It wasn’t as bad as I expected.  I thought it would be nearly impossible and that whatever I got down on paper would be unintelligible.  But it’s actually totally legible.  It was difficult and took time, but I was definitely able to do it.  Granted, it looks like a first-grader wrote it.  But that’s sort of the point.

Jan (the author of How to Train a Wild Elephant) says that one of the key lessons of this exercise is to cultivate beginner’s mind.  When we learn new skills we have beginner’s mind and everything seems possible.  Only when we become adept at something and stop trying do our horizons close in.  I remember at the beginning of law school the dean gave a welcome speech in which he told us that the time of limitless options was now over and it was time to start choosing one path from among the many.  I understood his point, but even at the time I didn’t like it.  I want to continue to have options, no matter how old I get.  Just because I went to law school doesn’t mean my path is set in stone.  My father did a residency in psychiatry in his 50s and I thought it was so courageous – it’s never too late to make a change and pursue something different.  Jan quotes a Zen master as saying “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”  I will try to keep a beginner’s mind and remain open to the possibilities in my life.

This week’s exercise is:

“Leave no trace: Choose one room of your house and for one week try leaving no trace that you’ve used that space.”

"His Family", Ernest Poole (1918)

Roger Gale is a widower with three adult daughters and he has suddenly realized he doesn’t know them.  That is where the action begins in His Family, the 1918 winner of the Pulitzer Prize.  This realization would doubtless concern him no matter what, but he is especially dismayed because he had promised his wife when she died that he would keep an eye on the girls and report back to her when they met again in the afterlife.  He has since suffered a crisis of faith and withdrawn from his family.  But now he means to get to know them once again.

Each daughter represents a possible path for a woman to follow, and tracing the drawbacks and benefits of each path is a major theme in the book.  One daughter, Laura, is a socialite, a party girl with no plans to have children and with no social consciousness.  Another, Edith, is a mother of five who is so wrapped up in her own children that she cannot think or speak of anything else.  The third, Deborah, is a social reformer and suffragist who is terrified to marry and have children because she fears she will never be able to go on with her work, which is the most important thing to her.  Roger Gale is most often perplexed by each daughter, and even more so by the interactions between them.  The narrator clearly favors Deborah, the social reformer, from the start and Roger gets there eventually too. She is, obviously, the best of his daughters.

Deborah’s dilemma may seem quaint to the modern woman who can “have it all,” but of course that’s just an illusion.  Before I got pregnant I never would have thought I would want to leave my career to stay with my baby.  But once Adeline was on her way I couldn’t imagine leaving someone else to care for her.  She is far and away the most important thing in my life.  Deborah’s fear suddenly seems so real to me.  Granted, I wasn’t feeling very passionate about my career as it was, so the comparison isn’t really apt.  But I do struggle to pay attention to things other than baby.  I definitely do not want to become like Edith – a mother and nothing else.  I asked a friend the other day what her parents did and she told me about her dad and then said her mom is “just a mom.”  Oh crap, I don’t want Adeline to ever say that about me.  Time to find a passion.  Deborah, I hear you.

The woman question was on the top of the nation’s mind in 1918, so it’s no surprise that this book was awarded the Pulitzer.  But there is more to it than that.  A deeper and more enduring theme is mortality and how we find immortality in the lives of our family.  Before she died, Roger’s wife told him, “You will live on in our children’s lives.”  Throughout the book he realizes the truth of that statement, as he gets to know his daughters and finds himself in each of them.  He feels the roots of his family before him and seeks comfort in the fact that he, too, will be a figure in the distance to the coming generations. 

Finally, Roger often contemplates the youth of mankind – he feels as a child still, and he sees everyone else in the same way.  All his life he has felt that he is just beginning, and now he is already nearing the end.  As he walks through a birch grove on his farm one evening, he comes to an understanding of it all.  “It seemed to Roger that all his days he had been only entering life, as some rich bewildering thicket like this copse of birches here, never getting very deep, never seeing very clearly, never understanding all.  And so it had been with his children, and so it was with these children of Edith’s, and so it would be with those many others – always groping, blundering, starting – children, only children all.”

The book also deals with the growth of New York City; immigration and poverty; and World War I.  Roger Gale came to New York when horses and carriages traveled its roads, and now he has to face the crush of modern life with its fast cars, tall buildings and bright lights.  Little did Roger know that the chaos of urban life was only just beginning.  One facet of this new city life that Roger struggles so much with is the influx of immigrants and the rise of tenements.  As he gets to know Deborah he sees her work with the children of these tenements and he gains a new understanding of the deprivation they face.  When World War I breaks out, he is faced with suffering on an even grander scale.  Roger comes to a new understanding of humankind and he learns to make sacrifices to help those beyond his own family. 

These political themes play an important role in the book, but it’s true strength is in dealing with the personal.  As Roger Gale comes to know his daughters, we come to know more about life.  Can we ask anything more from a novel?

"How to Train a Wild Elephant"

The mind is a creature of habit – without new stimulation it falls back into old patterns and mindlessness.  Without effort, we spend most of our waking time reliving the past, making plans for the future, or simply daydreaming.  We have only this moment, yet we find it so hard to actually live here.  The practice of mindfulness is the practice of living in the present.  But it can be hard to incorporate mindfulness into your life.  Enter How to Train a Wild Elephant. 

This is a handbook of 53 mindfulness exercises, one for each week of the year.  When I was doing a weekly mindfulness group, we would pick an exercise for each week and then report back the next week on how it went and what we learned.  It’s so useful to have a fresh exercise each week to prevent the mind from falling back into old habits.  I bought this book to provide that incentive to keep up my practice.  I plan to go through the book in order, doing one exercise each week.  I don’t have a group to report back to, so I’ll be journaling my experience right here.  It would be awesome if others joined me and shared their experiences as well.

So here is the first exercise:

“Use your nondominant hand for some ordinary tasks each day.”

Creative Writing Prompts: Stranger in a bar

This is just a silly little piece.  With the topic of "the truth" I suppose I could have gone a lot of different directions.  But when I think of some guy who's so drunk he mistakes a stranger for his buddy, I don't think he has anything really deep or meaningful to say.  So this is just what came to mind.  My take on drunk idiots.

Prompt: A stranger sits down next to you at the bar and, thinking you’re his buddy, begins to tell you “the truth”

I was sitting in the bar the other day, waiting for some friends, when this guy sits down next to me.  He seemed sort of douchey, you know the type: faux, gelled-up mohawk, green polo shirt.  I’m not talking forest green here, but that frat-boy, kelley green.  He was also clearly pretty drunk and just stared down at his half-empty drink.  There were a few other open seats so I wasn’t sure why he sat right next to me, but I prepared myself to ignore him.  Then he started talking.

“OK, man, listen, I’ve gotta tell you the truth.”  He raised his hand.  “Just wait, don’t say anything, let me finish, ok?”

I couldn’t imagine what he had to say to me, but he seemed so earnest.  Plus I was a little curious at this point.  So I let him talk.

“You know at the She and Him concert last week?”  I had been there, but I had no idea how he knew that.  Then again, a lot of people went, so maybe he just assumed?  I said nothing and kept listening.

“So I had a lot to drink during the opening acts and I was getting pretty drunk.  When they started playing I realized I really had to pee, so I went to the can.  Only there was a really long line.  I’m talking, it was longer than the line for the chick’s bathroom.  I mean, come on, that’s just not right, you know?  And I’m thinking, I’m a dude, what am I going to wait in line to pee for?  I’ll just go find a tree.  And to be honest, I’m pretty drunk at this point and I don’t think I could’ve waited anyway.  So I go out to the lawn and I’m looking for a tree.  But the thing is, all the trees have tons of people around them.  There was just no good place for a guy to take a leak.  I kept walking and somehow I ended up sort of backstage.  I don’t know where the guards were.  Hell, they were probably waiting in that damn line.  So I’m sort of wandering around back there thinking, hey, this is cool.  But then I realized that if someone found me I’d probably get kicked out, so I decided to get out of there.  But by this point I really had to go, and I knew I wasn’t going to find a tree if I went back out to the lawn.  No one was around so I figured, hey, I’ll just pee right here.  So I did.  Only, I guess I peed on some kind of electrical something, because all the lights and sound went out.”

“Wait, you caused that blackout?”

“Yeah, man, that’s what I’m saying.  I got the hell out of there and came back and just acted normal.  I figured they’d have a backup or something so I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal.  But I guess I peed on something pretty important.”

“Yeah, I guess you did.”  I was supremely annoyed with this guy by now.

“Come on man, don’t be a jerk about it.  I mean, it’s really pretty funny when you think about it, you know?”

“I guess.  But my wife was really looking forward to that concert and she was pretty disappointed we only got to see them play like ten minutes.”

He finally raised his head a little.  “Wait…. What?”

“You really pissed off my wife buddy, so thanks for that.”  I tried to get on his wavelength this time.

“Wait…”  He leaned back in his chair and studied my face, his drunk eyes struggling to focus.  “You’re… you’re not Rick.”

“No buddy, no I’m not.”  I let him flounder for a minute then grabbed my drink and walked away.  Seriously, what a douche.

The Pulitzer Project, or I Love Lists!

I’ve recently discovered that there is an entire online community calling themselves litbloggers.  And it turns out I’m one of them.  Something that these litbloggers apparently love to do is participate in “Reading Challenges.” 

OK, so the tone of that last sentence was a little bit judgey.  Full disclosure here: a Reading Challenge sounds to me like about the most fun I can have with my clothes on.  So let’s just say I’m jumping right in.

100 Novels

I’m not actually new to this, I just didn’t know I was doing it before.  A couple years ago I read Jane Smiley’s book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel in which she reviews 100 novels that she recently read (actually its 101, but 100 sounds neater).  I decided that I, too, would read said 100 novels.  And I did.  In about a year and a half.  It was awesome and I’m currently working on a post about the experience.  So more on that later.  I’ve been taking the last six months or so to just read whatever books come to mind, but I have to admit, I’ve been yearning for another list of books to tackle.  So imagine my delight when I found a website devoted to collecting lists of books to read: Reading Challenges! 

The challenge I’ve decided to take on is the Pulitzer Project – read all 84 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  I had already been thinking that this would probably be my next list, so when I found this challenge it was a match made in heaven.  I’ve read 8 of the novels already, so I have 76 to go.  Given my previous pace and the fact that I now have Miss Adeline to contend with, my goal is to complete the list in the next two years.  But that may be over-ambitious.  When I read Smiley’s list I read only those books (well, that and my once a month book club books, but who’s counting).  This time, though, I’m going to be a little bit easier on myself and read other books, too, if I get the urge.  And I’m hoping to keep up on my nonfiction reading.  While reading Smiley’s list I didn’t read any nonfiction and I was really missing it by the end.  All that is to say that two years might be too ambitious.  But we’ll give it a go.  First up is His Family (1918), which I’ve just started.  I’ll be posting here as I finish each book, so come join me on this journey!

And for the other list-lovers out there, here are the lists:

Light Reading: "Game of Thrones"

 After Dostoyevsky I decided I was in the mood for something a bit lighter.  Pop fiction, if you will.  I had been meaning to read Game of Thrones, so this seemed like the perfect time.  I actually read the first two books of the series, Game of Thrones and Clash of Kings.  Serious literature they are not, but they’re quite fun to read.   I mentioned in my post on Oscar Wao that I’m somewhat of a “genre” fan, and these books definitely fit the bill.  There’s a feel of historical fiction about them, with some magic and fantasy mixed in.  There are even dragons, so you know it’s going to be good.

I first heard about these books when I read a preview of the upcoming HBO show.  It sounded awesome, so I planned to read the books, but didn’t get around to it. We started watching the show on HBO and it really was good, so I bit the bullet and bought the books.  The first season of the show directly tracks the first book in the series.  It’s almost shocking how exactly spot on the show is.  The order of the scenes, the dialogue – everything is straight out of the book.  So reading the first book was a little boring at times since I knew everything that was coming.  But the second book was awesome.  I just put it down and I’m dying to start on the third one.  I’m going to save it for when I need another break of light reading, though.

So how do the books compare to others in the fantasy genre?  They have a feel of The Once and Future King, what with Lords and Ladies, Knights, and battles.  But I actually like them a lot more than TOFK.  I know, I know, TOFK is sacrosanct to some enthusiasts, but I felt like it was mostly written for young boys. To be fair, a lot of fans probably are young boys, or at least read it for the first time then.  Thankfully, Game of Thrones is definitely written for adults. Realistically, they’re not as good as Lord of the Rings (but really, what is?), but they’re very entertaining and you just can’t put them down.  I usually try to get as much sleep as possible to keep up with little Adeline, but I found myself reading during all her naps and staying up late to keep reading.  Now I’m overtired – oops!  I like that there is a large cast of characters and I like the way he often tells the story from an unexpected point of view.  And there are some kick-ass women, so that’s always nice. I don’t have much else to say about the books without giving away plot points – and in this kind of book you definitely don’t want any surprises ruined.  So I’ll just say that if you like fantasy novels, you will like these books.  Enjoy!