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.

Homer & Langley - E. L. Doctorow

I came across this book after reading about the Collyer brothers on Wikipedia and seeing it mentioned in the popular culture section. I’d read and enjoyed Ragtime and found the brothers fascinating subject matter, so checked it out from the library. The story is told in elegant prose form the perspective of Homer Collyer, a blind pianist who lives in a Harlem brownstone with his brother Langley, an obsessive hoarder. Through his eyes (or ears, rather) the reader passes through the early years of the 20th century into the 1980s, encountering bootlegging gangsters and roving hippies, observing two world wars, and generally chronicling the century as it matures, ragged and cynical, into its twilight years.

The book takes significant liberties with its facts and chronology—the actual Collyers died in 1947, and Langley was the musician, not Homer—but sticks close to key events (the gradual recession from society, the begrudging paying off of their mortgage in one fell swoop, their untimely end) proposing a thesis on the brothers recalcitrant hermitism, speculating on the impulse that made these bizarre introverted men effectively immure themselves in rubbish collected from the streets over decades.

The plot is episodic, structured only in the natural progression of the brothers’ lives from youth to old age. Having the narrator be a blind man was an interesting choice and one Doctorow handles effectively. His limited description of images was handled deftly, and I don’t recall spotting him describing something he couldn’t have known. The fact he’d had sight as a young man allowed him some context, at least; I expect it would be a greater challenge to write a novel with a narrator blind from birth.

Homer & Langley didn’t pack quite the punch that Ragtime did, but it was still worth reading, and encouraged me to grab another Doctorow book at some point.

Bringing Out the Dead - Joe Connelly

I came across this novel through a safari of hyperlinks through Roger Ebert’s review site. In the review of one movie (I forget which one now), the reviewer referenced a Scorsese nmovie I’d never heard of called Bringing Ou the Dead. I’m hardly a Scorsese expert, but I like what I’ve seen of his, so I looked into it and discovered the source novel by Joe Connelly.

Bringing Out the Dead is narrated by Frank Pierce, a burned out paramedic who works the night shift in Hell’s Kitchen, where he encounters a seemingly endless parade of human misery. Drawn from Connelly’s real life experiecne as a paramedic, the novel nevertheless takes on a surreal, otherworldly quality, as the scenarios encountered seem too harsh, too bleak, to bizarre to be a straightforward image of life in that time and place (though maybe I’m just naive).

This sense of unreality is reinforced by Frank’s dry description of ghosts from cases past, some who haunt him mutely from the edges of perception, others who insert themselves into his reality in an endless series of loops. He encounters the same girl, Rose, about a dozen times, each instance revealing a little bit more about the original Rose, a girl who he failed to save and who has thus inserted herself into his psyche, sliding in deep like a sliver of guilt.

Some of the cases seem medically impossible, such as the corrupt garbage kingpin who (briefly) survives having his head crushed by onbe of his garbage trucks, and the cases form the dispatcher grow increasingly strange, dissolve into litanies of suicides and informed by details a 911 dispatcher couldn’t possibly know. There are moments of shocking violence described without hyperbole or ramification. At one point one of Frank’s partners runs over an injured person. Was it a ghost? A hallucination? Did the guy know what he’d done? Did he care? Frank doesn’t say.

The novel seems less interested in reporting the veracity of events than in capturing a mood. Five years as a paramedic in a poor neighbourhood is no doubt a tough gig, and the story does a good job of illustrating what burnout probably feels like. Frank’s nights as a medic seem less like an occupation than a curse, a sisyphean ordeal foisted on him from some past misdeed.

The prose is hallucigenic but believable, a tough combination in first person, where overwriting can easily become apparent. A good book overall.