The Reef by Edith Wharton

"...What I meant was that when you've lived a little longer you'll see what complex blunderers we all are: how we're struck blind sometimes, and mad sometimes--and then, when our sight and our sense come back, how we have to set to work, and build up, little by little, bit by bit, the precious things we'd smashed to atoms without knowing it.  Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits."

The Reef is, apparently, Edith Wharton's attempt at writing a novel in the style of Henry James.  I love Wharton, but I find James to be very frustrating, so it's no surprise that The Reef is one of my least favorite of all the Wharton novels I've read.  In the Jamesian way, the plot is barely a plot at all, little more than a barebones structure on which to hang an investigation into the complexities of human thought and experience.  Most of the events in the novel involve one person ushering another person into a different room than the one they're standing in so that they can have a heart-to-heart conversation.  Those conversations never quite reach a satisfactory conclusion--that's why they keep having to do it over and over again.

But Wharton is a canny observer, and her clear prose makes The Reef a more enjoyable experience than wading through something like The Ambassadors.  The story follows George Darrow, an older man who is disappointed by the reticence of the woman he's loved for many years, Anna Leath.  His dissatisfaction compels him to drift into a brief affair with a young and impecunious woman named Sophy Viner.  This affair lasts for only a few days, and it drifts out of Darrow's mind, but later, when he and Anna are about to be reconciled, he visits her estate in the south of France to realize that her new governess is none other than--you guessed it--Sophy Viner.  And what's more, Sophy is engaged to Anna's stepson, Owen.

Sophy's low status gives Darrow the excuse he needs to mildly oppose the marriage, contrary to Anna's wishes, but this position threatens to divide the two older lovers as much as the revelation of Darrow's affair would.  The Reef is one of those strange reading experiences that remind us what a foreign world was the past of even a hundred years ago; it's impossible to imagine Darrow having the kind of anxiety he exhibits here in 2015.  His affair with Sophy would be unfortunate, and a bizarre coincidence, but it wouldn't drive him to the desperation to interfere with her marriage to Owen that he exhibits here.  Part of appreciating The Reef is accepting that Darrow's actions force him into a real moral dilemma, and that the choice he has to make between his own marital happiness and Sophy's is a reasonable one.  What is at risk for Darrow is the wholeness of a past, present, and future in Anna's love:

And so she seemed now to be walking to him down the years, the light and shade of old memories and new hopes playing variously on her, and each step giving him the vision of a different grace  She did not waver or turn aside; he knew she would come straight to where he stood; but something in her eyes said "Wait," and again he obeyed and waited.

Darrow's affair comes out of course; Anna is too observant and has been too intimate with Darrow than to be held in the dark.  Much of the psychological richness of the novel comes from the way that the characters "read" each other, always incompletely and inconsistently, but also with surprising perceptiveness.  Eventually--spoiler alert--the two of them come to a place of reconciliation, but Wharton refuses to offer a cheap solution to the question of which of the two, Darrow and Sophy, will get their marriage and their happiness.  Sophy drifts off in the end, away from the Leaths and back into poverty and uncertainty, toward the chaotic East represented by India.  The way in which the novel gives her up--in which she gives herself up for Darrow and Anna--is a bitter price that mutes the happiness we are meant to feel for Darrow and Anna.  It's hard not to feel that Sophy, always inherently honest and, if I can say so, a thousand times more interesting than the mild widow Anna, doesn't deserve what happens to her.  But then again, neither do Archer Newland and Countess Olenska, nor does Lily Bart.  (Ethan Frome probably deserves it, though.)

The Ambassadors by Henry James

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? This place and these impressions -- mild as you may find them to wind a man up so; all my impressions of Chad and of people I've seen at his place -- well, have had their abundant message for me, have dropped that into my mind. I see it now."

The Ambassadors frustrated me. Much of this was for the poor reason that it nearly single-handedly derailed my race to fifty. It is long, but not overly so, but it is James at his most intricate and convoluted. Sentences go on for the better part of a page, cluttered with appositive and subordinate phrases. Sometimes I would reread a sentence three or four times and still not be sure what it was saying:

He made no crude profession of eagerness to yield, but he asked the most intelligent questions, probed, at moments, abruptly, even deeper than his friend's layer of information, justified by these touches the native estimate of his latent stuff, and had in every way the air of trying to live, reflectively, into the square bright picture.

That it is a mild example. And yet, I tried to stifle my frustration, seeking what Harold Bloom calls reading's "more difficult pleasures."

But I had other issues. The Ambassadors is the story of Lambert Strether, an American in his fifties who travels to Paris to convince the son of the woman he wishes to marry that he should return home to take over the family business. Strether is so taken with Paris and Chad's circle that ultimately, he advises Chad not to return. There is a lot of fawning over Paris, over Chad, over Chad's friends, such as the beautiful Madame de Vionnet, and the earnestness nearly overwhelms. But it seemed to me that there was very little about Chad or Madame de Vionnet to fawn over, and so it is difficult to share in Strether's enthusiasm.

My old English teacher advised me that the secret is to "live in Strether's head." Fair enough: It isn't necessary to fall in love with Madame de Vionnet, only to fathom the way that Strether does. Indeed, most of The Ambassadors takes place there, and the narrative distance it creates from the other characters is part of what I found disaffecting. Perception is all:

He stopped, he looked back; the whole thing made a vista, which he found high melancholy and sweet -- full, once more, of dim historic shades, of the faint far-away cannon-roar of the great Empire. It was doubtless half a projection of his mind, but his mind was a thing that, among old waxed parquets, pale shades of pink and green, pseudo-classic candelabra, he had always needfully to reckon with. They could easily make him irrelevant.

This is striking, and highly ironic: nothing could make Strether irrelevant in this novel; he is all.

My teacher's advice was good; I appreciated the novel more when I consciously tried to dismiss the need for things like objects and descriptions and plot. By losing myself in Strether--which I was at first resisting--I came to a point where I found the novel's final third, in which Strether has to contend with his own conflicting desires about the next phase of his life, quite affecting. Even still, I think I might abstain from late-period James for a while.