The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

I read this over a month ago and I think I’ve missed a book or two in between. In any case, The Age of Innocence is one of the many 100 Great 20th Century Novels about unhappy rich people, and I can’t say that is one of my favourite genres (another big one among those books I don’t much care for is Male Writer Suffers Ennui in New England). I got through this one and didn’t mind reading it, so I would consider it a strong book on that fact alone.

The story concerns Newland Archer, a wealthy New York socialite who practices law more as a hobby than a career. He is betrothed to the equally wealthy May Welland, but before the wedding date is set her cousin Ellen Olenska arrives from Europe. Separated from her husband—a Count—and unfamiliar with the mores of 19th century New York, Ellen fascinated Newland, and next to her his fiancé seems hopelessly dull. He asks her to push forward the wedding, hoping that being finally married will put paid to his conflicted emotions, but she resists.

Most of the story concerns the shadow courtship between Newland and Ellen, both of whom struggle with attraction and guilt. The writing is coy in typical fashion for the era, and I’m not sure if they are ever intimate beyond holding hands (though maybe I missed something, being a typically unsubtle 21st century reader).

The writing is strong, and the characters are rich and well-drawn. Apparently the story draws on Wharton’s own childhood in terms of setting, and the details feel true to life. I doubt I’ll read it again, but that’s more a question of my interests than the book’s quality. Those into Jane Austen and the like will enjoy it.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West - Dee Brown

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was a title I’d always heard without knowing much of its contents. Its connection with American Indians was obvious from context, but whether it was a film or a novel or what I didn’t know. As it happens, the book is a historical chronicling of America’s western expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century, told entirely from the perspective of the tribes that were displaced or destroyed. It is a sad book, sympathetically told, and an important one, in that it collects the words and recollections of a people who were rarely allowed t ospeak for themselves—certainly not in as wide a forum.

There is a depressing repetitiveness to the book, which proceeds chronologically forward and, for the most part, geographically westward. In each chapter we meet (or occasionally revisit) a tribe, and watch as the same cycle repeats itself: pressure fro mwhite settlers forces the indians to accept some sort of treaty. The treaty is either a swindle from the outset, or bargained in good faith but reinterpretted later to be more beneficial to the United States government and less to the tribe. Tensions rise until the tribe is corralled into a reservation or goes to war with an enemy it cannot beat. Tactical intelligence sometimes brings brief victories, legal or martial, but the tide is inexorable, and it sweeps always west.

Though unflinching in its portrayal of history, this is not a bitter book. There are good white men who see the Indians as human beings and want to do right by them, and cynical tribes who ally with the American soldiers against other Indians in order to secure better terms for themselves. Yet individual goodness cannot perservere against an unfeeling system, and those who attempt to resist are either worn down into apathy or destroyed. In this sense it reminds me a bit of The Wire, a more modern example of flawed but good people bashing their heads against an unfeeling system in an effort to budge it an inch, and coming away with nothing for their troubles but pain.

Brown’s writing is strong and crisp, capturing some of the poetry of the men for which it speaks. Long passages are sometimes quoted which give particular evidence to the lyrical nature of native tongues, rich in metaphor and anchored closely to the land. I wouldn’t call Bury my Heart a light read, but it is an engaging and important one.

The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson

I picked up The Devil in the White City a few months after reading another of Larson’s books, In the Garden of Beasts, which chronicled the experiences of the American ambassador to Germany during the rise of Nazism. I greatly enjoyed that book, and so approached Devil with high expectations—especially as the subject matter was inherently intriguing.

The book follows the stories of two men in Chicago in the 1890s: Daniel Hudson Burnham, the driving force behind the creation of the Chicago World’s Fair; and H. H. Holmes, a conman and, arguably, the prototype for every serial killer to plague the 20th century. I’d heard of Holmes before, and knew a tiny bit about the World’s Fair, but there was plenty more for me to learn about both.

One particular way Larson excels is in titles—a small thing, in a sense, but important. In In the Garden of Beasts, he makes symbolic hay out of the fact that the American embassy in Berlin was located on the Tiergatrenstrasse, which translates to animal garden street—or, more poetically, “the street of the garden of beasts.” Similarly, The Devil in the White City evokes a feeling of infiltration and illusion, the idea that a place of wonder can be the perfect place for something dreadful to hide and fester.

Larson jumps back and forth between the two stories regularly, forming a counterpoint of themes that feels striking without seeming forced. The ideas a presented but not spelled out: light and darkness, creation and destruction. Larson’s prose is richer and more lyrical than you’d expect from a work of historical non-fiction, and he uses a lot of dramatic effects more common to a novel to drive the story forward.

While less exhaustive a chronicle than Beasts, the Devil in the White City is even more compelling in the picture it paints, all the more so in that the story it tells is much less known. The horrors or Nazism have been articulated in a hundred plus novels, movies, and television shows, but the more private atrocities of H. H. Holmes remain largely forgotten, despite the fact that, though on a much smaller scale, they betray an equal lack of basic humanity that underpins our society, and that has shown itself time and time again to be much more fragile than we would hope.