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 enjoyed spending time with. It could have been a slog but it wasn't.

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, 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. ( )

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 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. ( )