Ethan Frome

There's more than a measure of sardonic irony to this tragic tale. Distancing narrative techniques are used by author uses at key story points, so the central protagonist comes off as a hapless loser by design, regardless of whether the reader is sympathetic or not. The startling end is so steeped in irony, almost manevolently so, that it's hard not to read this thing as a secret warning to women readers of the world : "Don't depend on a pimple brain like this guy." And you can almost hear the author cackling as she pens the fate of the hypochondriacal wife. Such a deliberately constructed, loathsome character.
Worth reading, though. The romance aspects are very effectively done.

I do not know how to review this book.

I could write about the snow and the cold and the hard work and the sick wife. I could mention a persistent lack of money and an even more persistent lack of hope for any change in the future.

Or, I could write about a rich internal life, full to the brim and ready to spill. The delight of anticipation and the bittersweet memory of a few exchanges with the other. The quality of observing the other: a laugh, an inflection of the voice, a gleam in the eye.

Better yet, I could write about Edith and how she put together her Ethan and how she gave him an impossible task, she asked a question that did not have a right answer, she posed a problem that did not have a solution. And then she watched him and let show more us readers watch together with her. When we knew everything, when the story was told and there was nothing left to share, she turned towards us and masterfully delivered her final blow.

No, Edith Wharton did not need modernism and its flashy new gimmicks, she had at her disposal all the tools needed to smash her characters and her readers to pieces. show less

Digital audio narrated by C M Hebert

From the book jacket: Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena’s vivacious cousin enters their household as a hired girl, Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.

My reactions:
I love Edith Wharton’s writing. I love the way she explores relationships and unfulfilled desires. The tension is palpable, the yearning almost unendurable.

She’s a little heavy-handed with the allegory / metaphor in this case. The setting is Starkfield, Massachusetts, in winter; as if the reader needs a reminder of how depressing and show more lacking in color Ethan’s life is. Though I was reading in the midst of a summer heat wave, I felt chilled. And then I felt that spark of attraction between Ethan and Mattie. Felt Ethan’s heart soar with the possibilities, only to sink with the realization that he was trapped in a device of his own making.

C M Hebert does a fine job narrating the audio book. He reads at a fine pace, and his tone is suitable to the material. After listening, however, I also picked up the text and read through several passages. I think I prefer the text so that I can savor Wharton’s writing. show less

I decided to download this novel because a character in my favourite film refers to it as 'a horrible book' that should be taken off the curriculum; apart from that, I was only on nodding acquaintance with the title. Though depressing, Ethan Frome is not a horrible book - stark, yes, but also evocative and powerful. (My nomination for the 'Horrible Book' award goes to Moby Dick.) Opening with a pointless narrator like Wuthering Heights, Frome's Yorkshire stable mate, Ethan Frome tells the story of a miserable husband so frustrated that he drives himself and the object of his affections into a tree. Personally, I would have strapped the wife to the sleigh, but then none of the characters are perfect. Ethan is weak, Zeena manipulative, show more and Mattie immature. Still, I was hoping for a more satisfying ending, or at least an escape route for Ethan, but hey ho. show less

That was a smash-up conclusion at the climax of this claustrophobic chamber drama. The central characters include not only Ethan, Zenobia, and Mattie but Winter as well. It casts its heavy mantle on half of each Berkshire year, driving people indoors, turning them inward, and occasionally tempting them to sled down the hill on crisp moonlit nights. At the bottom, a large elm looms; its role as nemesis is clear. From the first mention, the reader is as sure as when a rifle hangs over the fireplace in a Chekhov play that this will play a crucial role in the plot. The suspense lies in not knowing how until the end.
Wharton’s depiction of a loveless couple locked in a malignant embrace had me siding with Ethan (after all, the novella show more isn’t named Zenobia) until I realized that Wharton had mentioned in passing that nearly every woman in town was ailing. She never explores why; it’s just the way it was. Coupled with winter was a grinding poverty and the desperation it brought with it. The result is as ineluctable as Greek tragedy. show less

7.0/10

I do love me some melodrama -- I really do -- and sometimes one just savours it.

But there are times when you just toss the book back into the library slot, and Pffft! like a bad dream, it's already forgotten, except for a faint echo of the doom-and-gloom wintery landscape.

I'm being completely irreverent, I realize, when I suggest a better name for Ethan might have been Eeyore, and so I bow with humility in the face of all those who loved and lost -- and raved about Ethan. But. My. God.

While I understand, very well, that the forces that shape us are often unseen and unexpected; that our lives hang by Fates more often than they hang by our own design, in this instance Wharton failed her character completely; or conversely he failed show more her. I don't think Wharton had enough of a grasp of the Fromes of the world -- she was just one second behind the beat, at every turn: just couldn't synchronize true poverty and despair with anguish and defeat, for the life of her. She might have understood the anguish of the "rich and famous", but she's a step behind on that "poverty thing."

The novel sounds so hopelessly contrived, that I'm surprised I'm giving her such a high rating.

I think the language moved me -- the language of landscape, that is: for that, Wharton has a keen eye, deep appreciation and true understanding.

As for Eeyore, ahem ... Ethan ... there are straw scarecrows with more backbone and substance.

To marry someone because she was ... there?? Obviously, Ethan left all the wit he had back at Worcester college where he studied; and so it seems to me this book would be better termed Just Desserts.

He's not a sympathetic character for me because he bears the signs of a creature observed, and painted, rather than of someone whom one knows and understands.

Perhaps unwittingly, Wharton herself avows this approach to the novel. In discussing her work with Daniel Berkeley Updike, from Merrymount Press, Wharton said to him:

One wintry autumn afternoon we were driving in the country near Lenox, and on the top of a hill on the left of the road stood a battered two-story house, unpainted, with a neglected door-yard tenanted by hens and chickens and a few bedraggled children sitting on the stone steps before the door. 'It is about a place like that,' said Mrs. Wharton, 'that I mean to write a story.' Only last week I went to the village meeting-house [church] and sat there for an hour alone, trying to think what such lives would be and some day I shall write a book about it.'

Sat there for an hour.

I've given more thought to this review than she gave to the likes of Frome.

Unfair on my part? Undoubtedly.

Still ... it's the kind of thing that we pick up on, and nit pick, a century after the fact. But it's not completely unwarranted on my part.

While writers glean inspiration from everything in life, it feels much too contrived to me, to sit and "observe a population", like a scientist and then try to deliver a moral tale on the subject. It seems to me that two disparate forces are at play, and that's probably why this doesn't work for me. It's jarring. It's inauthentic.

I read Wharton's own marital debacle, in this novel, more than I read a true portrait of Ethan. Zeenia seems to be an exorcism of Teddy Wharton, her hubby, who suffered from horrific depression; was more than a little bit of a cad even when he was sane; and, ultimately, in the nut-house department would have given even Mrs. Rochester a run for her money.

Frome is weak and lazily sketched; Zeenia, Xenophobia, Zenobia* is a caricature (even if not a downright literary assassination) of her hubby; and Mattie is barely a ghost in all of this, representing Ethan's ephemeral longing for a last hurrah for freedom. Even in this, he proves to be rather spineless -- but in the end manages only to damage Mattie's spine. What (silly, silly) irony!

And so, to wrap up this review like a proper grammar-school essay, "I like Wharton quite a bit when she sticks to things she knows something about."

* Wikipedia tells me: Zenobia was a cultured monarch and fostered an intellectual environment in her court, which was open to scholars and philosophers. She was tolerant toward her subjects and protected religious minorities. The queen maintained a stable administration which governed a multicultural multiethnic empire. Zenobia died after 274, and many tales have been recorded about her fate. Her rise and fall have inspired historians, artists and novelists, and she is a patriotic symbol in Syria.

Huh. Who knew?!

In this delicious irony, maybe it's the one point Wharton got right. show less

"He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface....he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access."

This is one of those classics that is assigned reading in U.S. high schools, probably because it is so short. At least it was in my 10th grade back in the 1960's. And I hated it then, and I've heard from others how had to read it as a young teenager who also hated it. However, many years later, in older middle age, I read it again, and loved it. I recently reread it again as part of the Wharton buddy read on Litsy, and yes, it's still an excellent book.

New England farmer, Ethan Frome, is living a life of show more isolation and quiet despair. In an unhappy marriage with his invalid wife Zeena, the only bright spot in his life is Zeena's cousin Mattie Silver, who is Zeena's caregiver. The harsh environment of a New England winter in an isolated village plays a big part in the tale.

Unlike many of Wharton's better-known books in which characters are members of NYC high society and the American aristocracy, in Ethan Frome, her characters are the struggling poor and rural underclass. In many ways, I admire the books in which Wharton focuses on the lower classes more than those in which she focuses on the upper classes.

Highly recommended.
4 stars

First line: "I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story show less