The Children

This is... an odd one. It's the fourth Wharton book I have read, or attempted anyway, and dear God definitely the last I shall ever pick up. Since Wharton is such an apparently beloved author, I feel a little out of my depth in criticising her work but what can you do, when each novel of hers I have read has felt a little like torture?

The Children didn't grab me, but it was easier to read than the last Wharton I tried (The Age Of Innocence) and eventually I found myself kind of entrenched in it, in that way when people describe watching a car crash and being unable to look away, similar to how I read The House Of Mirth, except without the slightest emotional investment. I wanted to know where this bizarre and disturbing and irritating show more story was going, without enjoying the process of getting there, but it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page. I'd say perhaps it has become obscure due to its dubious content, but the copy I'm reading is clearly a modern edition. And then just a glance at its goodreads page shows people adore it and no one is finding it... well, you know, incredibly paedophiley.

It's written in Wharton's usual smug, satirical style, where you hate everyone you meet and don't understand why you have to read any of this. As usual it is about how awful American high society is, but at complete opposites to The House Of Mirth - in which a whiff of scandal destroys lives, whereas in The Children the fact that no one cares about scandals is what destroys lives, and at odds with The Age Of Innocence which is about how the old ways of society are killing the new generation, whereas here the news ways of society are the evil and the old ways wistfully missed. I get it okay, you hate everyone and everyone sucks. Thanks for writing another miserable book about another male hero who is constrained by society, also a monster and crushes women under his boots. I don't even know if I'm meant to like Wharton's characters or not, but I sure as hell don't.

It's just impossible to get inside the story. Wharton constantly tells instead of shows. Not to say that she skimps on description, but I never for a second feel like I'm looking at a room full of people, but instead am reading an essay about them written by a psychiatrist. Martin Boyne, the lead of this book, very much like the lead in The Age Of Innocence, analyses constantly instead of thinking or feeling anything. Every encounter with Rose, his fiancée, is just a wall of him analysing and dissecting her behaviour, against all actual evidence, everything is underhand and distrustful, it's almost foul to read. While his own thoughts are somehow constantly hiding from him. I struggle to believe any actual humans think or behave in this manner. In fact, I never got a grasp on Boyne's real emotions. Wharton just had to state them every now and then without making them remotely convincing. I was nearly at the end of the book when I discovered that he is genuinely supposed to be in love with Judith. I just thought he was being obsessive and creepy and that the unconvincing emotions were unconvincing because they were supposed to be illusory or transient, but no apparently it was meant to be real love that lasts for years, and Wharton is just incapable of writing convincing human beings. Why is Boyne obsessed with these children anyway? Not a one of them is remotely interesting. Oops, Wharton forgot to put those scenes in the book. She just tells us Boyne is captivated, without showing why. Unless it is entirely his secret attraction to Judith's mouth. In which case, why is there no conclusion - no popping of his creepiness, no comeuppance or realisation, instead just a slow crawl to the story not being on any more and no actual plot or revelations having occurred.

And then we come to the subject matter of the book, which is intensely creepy from start to finish. Boyne is on his way to meet Rose, whom he loves but was married when he used to know her. Now she is free and he has finished his work and they are to meet again. On the journey, he meets a girl who is looking after her six younger siblings (some of whom aren't blood relations) because their parents are selfish beings who care only for their own pleasure instead of their responsibilities. It's immediately difficult to care that much about the situation, because the children do actually have three or four adults looking after them and are also rich and none of them orphans, but somehow Wharton tries to tell us only poor young Judith is in charge of the children. Her one desire is to keep them from being separated by any more volatile divorces. Boyne is captivated by how Judith seems old, because she is a mother to the siblings, and young, because she has had no education or life of decency to shape her. Eventually Boyne meets up with Rose, and Judith and the children follow him, and his attraction to Judith destroys his relationship with Rose. Instead of caring, he revels in how he can be unconstrained romping around with the children, without ever actually trying to help them in any practical way, and his attraction for Judith, which other adults are clearly aware of, starts messing with him as he loves her as a wife and the poor innocent girl loves him like a father. The only saving grace here is that the book is written by a woman, so presumably not meant to be as creepy as it is, but it is riddled with a man's desire for a pubescent girl, lots of lingering descriptions of her rosy lips, and added with his obsession with all the children, it just comes across as the story of a wannabe paedophile. Unfortunately there is no comeuppance. When he finally gives in to his desires, Judith is so innocent, trusting and seeing him as a father, that she doesn't even notice what he is saying. We never find out what horror she might feel if she really knew or was made to have a physical relationship with him. Instead the children go back to their mother and Boyne runs away for three years, then bumps into one of them and finds everything went to pot and he watches a now legal Judith lustfully through a window and then runs away again. I mean, I say legal. I have no idea what the ideas of age of consent were in the 1920s - apparently it was totally fine to give children alcohol and cigarettes, and although it is frowned on that Boyne fancies Judith, only because he is engaged to Rose, otherwise it is seen as quite natural. Only Boyne himself - protesting too much as he repeatedly calls and describes her as a child to distance and disguise his feelings for her finds it disturbing for a man in his forties to want to be romantically involved with a minor. Unfortunately his constant framing her as a child while still coveting her, only makes him seem more like a paedophile than ever, casting a dark shadow over his ease and obsession with the other children even more, especially since the 'adult society' he is running away from, that with Rose, is so pleasant, loving and understanding - not oppressive as he claims.

Anyway, it wasn't as boring as The Age of Innocence, nor as depressing as The House Of Mirth, but it was by far much more disturbing. I read it with a curl of disgust on my lip and I wish it had had a Wikipedia page so I could have just read the summary instead of having to slink through the whole book, which has almost no plot, and no satisfying conclusion, and apparently, almost no problem with sexual predators, or at least, no desire to examine the can of worms it is cracking open. Added with Wharton's interminable style of analysis instead of actual dialogue and actions, I am glad to be on the other side, in a world where I never have to read another word she wrote. show less

29. The Children by Edith Wharton
OPD: 1928
format: 266-page ebook
acquired: April 21 read: Apr 21 – May 14 time reading: 10:25, 2.3 mpp
rating: 3
genre/style: Classic theme: Wharton
locations: mainly Venice and Dolomites
about the author: 1862-1937. Born Edith Newbold Jones on West 23rd Street, New York City. Relocated permanently to France after 1911.

I adore Wharton, but this was not my favorite. Actually I felt the last two, this and [Twilight Sleep], were good but lesser than most of her previous work. A little too much light jokey cute stuff for me. Martin is weird, Judith is a child and Rose is only a side character...

This is a story where single and approaching-middle-age Martin Boyne meets a group of seven children without their show more parents on a liner in the Mediterranean. He's headed to meet his new probable-fiancé in the Italian Dolomites. But he gets caught up in these wealthy but very neglected children and finds himself helping them, to his seeming detriment.

As readers, we spend this book waiting to see how Martin will manage his unacknowledged attraction to the eldest child, 15-yr-old Judith. He acts appropriately to her every way, but there is so much in his own head that he isn't able to acknowledge that we can't say how he will end up, which is a lot creepy. It's also clear this Judith is using him, but she seems in such need and so innocent.

Martin's Wharton-like fiancé, Rose Sellars, has a problem to manage in her distracted partner. We never see inside Rose's mind, or see her sweat, so to speak. Instead we meet an almost goddess-like steady and always practical woman, quietly maintaining her dignity. Her feelings show through in a painfully quiet manner. She adds a needed dimension to an otherwise flighty book. But she's a side character.

On closing the book, I found myself rethinking on how much Judith may have been managing Martin. That's maybe interesting or maybe silly. But I had to spend a lot of time with silly children and their sillier parents, switching partners with the seasons. Light stuff, kind of cute, kind of funny.

I wouldn't call this one a miss. It has its interesting parts. But I'm hoping the (500-plus-page) [Hudson River Bracketed] has more to offer.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/360386#8544840 show less

Edith Wharton The Children

Over twenty years ago I read The Children and only whispers of it remained in my mind. A book read at one age is not the same book read at another. This time the predicament of the protagonist, Martin Boyne, emerged in its full pathos. A solitary man in his early forties, an engineer, Boyne heads for Europe to meet the woman, Rose Sellars recently widowed, with whom he has corresponded with romantic constraint for years. It is understood between them that should matters go well, they will marry. On the way, however, he becomes entangled with a group of children, the oldest of whom, Judith, captures his heart. From then on he struggles between his avuncular affection for Judith and a growing infatuation. The show more children are a group of seven, wholes, halves and steps flung together by their wealthy, pleasure-loving and self-absorbed parents. Judith has become the ‘little mother’ of them all, determined to keep them together and Boyne becomes first their champion and then, for a brief time, their guardian. Although he has almost succeeded in hiding his feelings for Judith from himself, he cannot keep them from Rose Sellars, his friend, and when the group descends upon them in the Italian Alps their understanding unravels.
While it is shocking that a man over forty could consider a fifteen year old girl romantically, I think Wharton’s purpose was to show an honorable man, innocent and inept at personal relationships (as he says himself, he is better at mathematical calculations and good hard work than anything else) in way over his head. The allure of the children is their liveliness and simplicity; he finds them nothing less than miraculous. He has lived a solitary hard life building dams and bridges in out of the way places and I think we are meant to see how vulnerable an older person can be to unexpected vitality and life. This aspect of the story was most likely lost on me as a late twenty-something......
Certainly not her best novel, but as always, the writing is very very good, the story bold and her description of the habits and parenting skills of this ‘new‘ set of the wealthy nomads emerging in the 1920’s is fascinating and excoriating. You could call Judith and her siblings, impossibly rich and impossibly deprived, dark precursors of Eloise, the ‘real’ story ..... and you would not be far off. Or, even better, The Beautiful and the Damned meet Eloise. In any case, the hook is not the romance but what will become of the children.
The best writing is in the smaller details, such as this description of the end of summer in the mountains: “It was one of those steady business-like rains which seem, in mountain places, not so much a caprice of the weather as the drop-curtain punctually let down by Nature between one season and the next.”

“Was it a sign of middle age, he wondered, to take beatitude so quietly?”

“Judith’s eyes widened. ‘Well, what can mother do... ?’
Mrs Sellars lowered her lids softly, as if she were closing the eyes of a dead self. “Why, she could.... she could... think of all of you, my dear.’”

Indeed. show less

The Children is the fourth Edith Wharton novel I have read this year. I have been reflecting on how glad I am that I have come to her fairly late. I first read The House of Mirth many, many years ago, when, I think, I was too young to appreciate her. I then re-read it in January and it remains one of my favourite reads of 2012.
The Children I think is probably a novel that is less well known than some and according to the introduction to my edition by Marilyn French – much less appreciated. Yet I have to say straight off that I loved it.
The subject is one that many people (especially at the time when it was written) may have found rather distasteful – the infatuation of a middle-aged man for a fifteen year old girl. Future readers show more however will be pleased to know that this story is not Lolita. Judith Wheater is a charmingly honest young girl by turn maternal and childlike whose preoccupations are totally innocent and familial.
“The young face mounting towards him continued to bend over the baby, the girl’s frail shoulders to droop increasingly under their burden, as the congestion ahead of her forced the young lady to maintain her slanting position halfway up the liner’s flank.”
Many Edith Wharton novels are known for their exploration of old New York society into which she was born and within which she lived for many years. This old New York society with its mores, manners and conventions is very much in the background of this novel. The setting is Europe, yet the characters are from the very sections of society that Edith Wharton is famed for writing about.
While travelling by cruise ship between Algiers and Venice Martin Boyne an unmarried engineer from New York – and very much part of that old New York Society, although a poor one - meets the children of the title. Seven children ranging in age from a toddler to a girl of fifteen, they are a group of full blood, half and step siblings who are travelling with their governess and nursery maids. Judith the eldest has taken on the role of surrogate mother to the younger children. The children’s parents a group of self-centred wealthy nouveau riche – who live mainly out of hotels, and think nothing of marrying, divorcing, re-marrying, and squabbling over their children - are the other section of society that Edith Wharton portrays brilliantly, with a satirical slant. Martin is due to meet up with the woman he has loved for many years, Rose Sellars a conventional member of New York society is newly widowed and now free to acknowledge her feelings for Martin which her marriage had not allowed her to do. Drawn into the lives of the Wheaters however, Martin decides to stay for a couple of days in Venice before going on to Switzerland, and here he involves himself further into the lives of the children and their parents.
“Lady Wrench had snatched up her daughter and stood, in an approved film attitude, pressing Zinnie’s damp cheek against her own, while the child’s orange-coloured curls mixed with the red gold of hers. “What’s that nasty beast been doing to momma’s darling?” she demanded, glaring over Zinnie’s head at Judith. “Whipping you for wanting to see your own mother, I suppose? You just tell momma what it was and she’ll…”
The children are determined to stay together, rather than be farmed back out to the various natural or stepparents who decide they want them at one time or another. Martin pledges to help, not admitting even to himself at first, his true infatuation to Judith. Martin does have very real affection for all the children, and does want to help them. However when the group follow him to Switzerland without their parent’s knowledge, Martin’s and Rose’s burgeoning engagement is affected. Martin is endlessly pulled between these two different worlds, the world of polite old New York that is represented by Rose Sellars and the less conventional world of the children.
The characters of the children are wonderful, they are funny and endearing, and the relationships between each of them and with Martin Boyne are poignant and deeply charming. Martin is a fool, but a sympathetic one nonetheless. Martin’s dilemmas and mistakes are age-old ones, the ending inevitable and beautifully poignant. show less

This is the only Wharton story I can think of that has children as the main characters; she's surprisingly good at writing them. The basic tale follows a middle-aged man who, through a shipboard friendship with a young woman, becomes the nominal guardian of seven children. The children's parents, all jet-setting superficial types who have married and subsequently divorced each other, use the children as pawns in divorce settlements and suchlike--only the children themselves want to stay together as a ragtag little family. I always want to fling Wharton books across the room when I'm done with them, and this was no exception. For all the lack of a happy ending (like this comes as a surprise), it's an almost upbeat book.

Martin Boyne encounters the children, a disparate group of seven siblings, halfs, and steps, as they are being shepherded aboard the first-class deck of an ocean liner sailing from Algiers en route to Venice to meet their parents. Their shepherd is the eldest of the Wheater children, Judith, who at 15 has taken on the role of mothering the tribe with some help from Miss Scopes, an ineffectual governess, and a nurse, Susan, who cares for the infant, Chip. These are Jazz-age hotel/yacht children, shuffled from one destination to another, at the whim of their parents' states of marriage or divorce or their search for pleasure and diversion.

Although Boyne is on his way to Switzerland to meet with long-time friend and newly-widowed Rose show more Sellars, he determines to first accompany the children to Venice. Touched by their plight, and especially Judith's determination to keep the brood together, he thinks he may have some influence with their parents as he had gone to Harvard with the father and was acquainted with the mother.

Wharton draws the reader in with great sympathy for Boyne, Rose and the children accompanied by disdain for the reptilian lives led by most of the adults who should be responsible for them. But as usual with Wharton, idealism faces a fierce adversary in hard-headed reality.

The novel has moments of lyrical beauty, subtle psychological insights and is quite fascinating. By no means a tragedy, it does, however, leave the reader with a feeling of sadness and lost possibilities. show less

I am a big fan of Edith Wharton. She wrote of a time and class that she knew well. She was also a keen observer and wrote with such detail that it is easy to get caught up in her stories. Martin Boyne is on a voyage to Venice when he recognizes his seat mate's name as someone he knew many years ago at Harvard. He is quite surprised when a lovely teenage girl sits down and proceeds to take command of a lively assortment of younger children. When he learns this is the daughter of his friend who is traveling with six "siblings", a governess, and two nurses, he takes the group under his wing. What he had thought would be a lonely voyage quickly turns into fun and games with this loosely related troupe of fun-loving children.

As in all of show more Wharton's writing, there is a dark side. In this case it is the lax parents who come and go as they please leaving 15-year-old Judith in charge. "The Wheaters," as their children refer to them, have recently reunited after a divorce, but philandering is common in their social group and their reunion with the seven children is short-lived. Wharton shows that things haven't changed all that much in the 86 years since the book was first published. The "smart set" is more concerned with their social status than their duties as parents. As she often does in her books, the author presents difficult circumstances which lead to troublesome outcomes.

While this book isn't in the same exemplary category as her more well-known works, it is very good. I just don't think it was possible for this woman to write a bad book! I would recommend it to fans of Wharton as another example of life in the gilded age. show less