Hudson River Bracketed

Vance Weston is an aspiring young writer who came of age in the American Midwest in the 1920s. After a sudden illness, his family packs him off to New York’s Hudson Valley to stay with distant relatives and recover in the country air. Vance is thrilled, confident that proximity to New York City will jump-start his career. Early in his stay he meets Halo Spear, a woman a few years older and much wiser in the literary arts, and she becomes a sort of muse, broadening Vance’s literary perspective while nurturing his talent.

Poor decision-making sours Vance’s relationship with the relatives and he returns home, but finds his way back to New York a few years later. He leverages contacts made previously to find work at a literary review, show more but continues to make bad, impulsive decisions including a ridiculously misguided marriage and a series of career missteps borne either of naïveté or arrogance. Vance never achieves the financial success he believes he is entitled to.

And there’s the rub: that entitlement. Vance seems to regard himself as somewhat of a genius, a view that Halo continues to encourage, but Edith Wharton failed to convince me of his talent. Instead, I found him a petulant, annoying young man and the entire novel quite melodramatic, all the way to the end which offered a completely unrealistic resolution to some of Vance’s dilemmas. Apparently I am not alone: in the Afterword of the Virago edition, Marilyn French speculates on Wharton’s intentions for this “portrait of an artist as a young man,” and concludes that she was not entirely successful.

Edith Wharton is one of my favorite authors, but those not familiar with her work would find classics such as House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence a better introduction. show less

Although this was long and each time I went back to it I kept wondering how it could be so long at the same time I didn't really want it to be any shorter. Vance Weston is an aspiring, possibly brilliant writer who seems to have no sense of how to get on in the world. I'm constantly amazed at his bad decisions and the wake they leave behind but I can't quite make myself dislike him. Give him a good talking to perhaps, At the same time, he is surrounded by many people who are as bad if worse and he has absolutely no ability to understand them and their motives. Despite this, I just kept reading on and on because it is a great novel, I'm sure packed with more literary world satire than I could catch on to and full of characters I really show more enjoyed spending time with. It could have been a slog but it wasn't. show less

55. Hudson River Bracketed by Edith Wharton
OPD: 1929
format: Kindle ebook
acquired: May read: Aug 5-28 time reading: 17:23
rating: 4
genre/style: classic novel theme: Wharton
locations: suburban Chicago, New York City and areas around NYC
about the author: 1862-1937. Born Edith Newbold Jones on West 23rd Street, New York City. Relocated permanently to France after 1911.

My latest Wharton. My Wharton group has almost read all her novels. This later volume is first of two volume series. The second part, [The Gods Arrive], was published three years later (1932).

Advance Weston, who goes by Vance, is natural literary talent in a sterile world. He grows up in suburban Chicago, invents a religion without understanding anything about religion. Leaves show more his parents, and their questionable wealth based on inside-info real estate booms, to go to New York City. But his closest relation to the city, a distant impoverished cousin, lives upstate, a train ride from downtown. It's in upstate New York, along the Hudson, he meets Halo Speare, an irreverent well-educated girl who, moved by Vance's efforts at poetry, inspires him. This is not a romance. Vance will go on to become a professional author, working primarily for Halo's husband. But complications ensue. Vance marries but this salary is too low to support his wife, who doesn't like his literary world. Halo's husband wants to control people, including Vance. His own literary insight primarily a derivative of advice from his wife, Halo, who is careful to advise him without him realizing it's her ideas. Not a happy marriage. Vance's career stumbles as these relationships take their natural course, well Wharton style.

I don't know how to sum that up any shorter, and that's one of the issues with novel. It's looking at themes of wealth and substance, art and economics, and a writer's life, unhappy marriages, and various shams. There is a long side story on Vance's grandmother, who is basically selling a get-spiritually-rich-quick religious scam. The title of the novel comes from an old empty house full of classic literature that no one is allowed to read. It's a style of architecture that was outdated by the time of book. The house is kept up by Vance's distant cousins for the absent owner. That's just a lot. This is Wharton's longest book.

I've been stumbling through Wharton's later books. Her prose and wit are still here, and her characters interesting, but her sense of how to strike the reader with a deeper meaning is, well, it's less accessible. She's telling the themes she wants to tell, ranting, in her way, against the 1920's artistic and economic trends. Here it's Halo that grabs our attention, a special character that makes the book something a little extra. But Wharton strangles Halo into an unhappy marriage, and book roles on with her life compromised. It's a book that has its moments and its points, but the two aren't exactly aligned.

A book for Wharton completists.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/362165#8613062 show less

I continue to have trouble getting into Wharton's later novels. This one, which deals with the travails of a young writer, Vance Weston, I simply found sprawling and bloated, and it was a struggle to get to anything I did find engaging. Wharton obviously wants to make Weston sympathetic, yet she can't help but show how his thoughtless egotism affects the people around him, especially the women (several of whom are excellently done characters in their own right).

What I did like a lot was Wharton's depiction of the writing life, of its frustrations and inspirations. There's a particularly good passage near the end in which Weston sees through a window the fully laden branch of an apple tree, and the sight inspires him: "this mute show more swinging wide of the secret doors...that flash of mysterious light." It's just a pity that the intriguing core of the book is so often hidden by its much less intriguing plot. show less