They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars.

The perfect soundtrack for this novel: "I Need My Girl" by The National.

Wow, I'm speechless. It's ten past midnight and I just couldn't go to sleep without finishing this story. Don't let its size fool you, every page of this book is full of raw emotion that will leave you feeling heavy and achy all over. The writing is so elegant and the prose, every word, every phrase was thoughtfully placed and had significance. Oh I just can't praise Edith Wharton enough. This is arguably the best book I've read so far in 2016.

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Wow! I went into this one still processing the last book I read (Call Me By Your Name) and thinking maybe a novella and a few short stories would be a great way to ease into something else. It worked!

But Mrs. Hale had said, "You've had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome," and he felt less alone with his misery.

This is the book with marvelous writing that sets you in a different atmosphere and melancholic emotional state. It is a story about longing, isolation, sorrow, complexity of life, written in long descriptive prose that is surely my favored kind of writing style.
A great piece of literature that expands beyond the ethics and morals and shows life is a much more perplexing than a black and white picture. Perfect for people that consider adultery unjustifiable and inexcusable and can’t find empathy for infidelity.
What Wharton brilliantly does is description of cruel unexchangeable circumstances of destiny that make a person quietly despair. Ethan From is a character of desperation, someone who has become stiff, cold, almost internally dead in an environment of a poor farm in neverending winter. The language of landscape is outstanding, and I love that, as in Wuthering Heights, the landscape and weather reflect the internal state of characters. The cold, always snowy and gloomy environment is interconnected with melancholy, emotional coldness of marriage without love or passion and lives stuck as they have been frozen in ice.

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; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

Ethan is an odd character. At the same time, I’ve sympathized with him immensely, but he was a little distant and I couldn't connect with him completely, and there is almost a wall between him and the reader. Ethan is also an example of a grown man fixed in the mother-complex. His freedom was constrained in his early life with taking care of sick mother, and later on, he exchanges the sick mother for always-in-bed, hypochondriac, neurotic wife. His wife Zeena has total control over him, and much of that authority over him is due to her always being in the bad physical state.  Adler described the way patients can use physical or psychological symptoms in order to attain power, which is exactly how Zeena establishes her dominance. Their marriage is a relationship without connection, companionship, emotion, or comfort on any level. What Ethan thought will alleviate his solitariness in Starkfield, becomes the main source of isolation as a relationship without partnership can bring up more loneliness than solitude. But even in a marriage of that quality, without any form of true communication, Ethan is codependent and can’t make autonomous decisions.
Ethan’s life is a perpetual loop of things that he doesn’t like but has nor strength nor possibilities to change. In that state on his farm comes young Mattie, and she is the alteration that brings long-forgotten spark in his life. Wharton excels in describing the true nature of erotic, not sexual obsession. The sexual desire strives to relieve tension, but the erotic longing is in a whole completely different realm. Erotic has transformative power over a person’s life, it can make dead feel alive again, the unauthentic qualities become vibrant and true, it transforms dullness into a fiery passion and a priorly meaningless life into a life worth living. The object of erotic desire, Mattie, reminds Ethan of all of the parts of himself that were lost or neglected in his dismal everydayness. In contrast to sexual infatuation that longs for other person body, erotic fantasy is not just a relationship with other persons, it’s a fantasy about transformed, different kind of life, and another version of oneself, a dream about a life of fulfillment, intimacy, joy, freedom, warmth and happiness.

The commonplace nature of what they said produced in Ethan an illusion of long-established intimacy which no outburst of emotion could have given, and he set his imagination adrift on the fiction that they had always spent their evenings thus and would always go on doing so…

Maybe the book is a little bit didactic in displaying dreadful consequences of overindulging in the erotic fascination, showing how the great promises of erotic can end up in ruin. The storyline makes his book a highly relatable tragedy. Maybe not every single person indulged in the erotic obsession, but every person was susceptible to the false promise of absolute fulfillment in external objects. whatever it may be. Ethan can make us feel less alone in sometimes desolate experience of life that can be cold and melancholic as winters in Starkfield.

Edith Wharton’s an eloquent and immaculate writer, her writing knits an emotional tether to the reader, and one intermittently returns to her writing to enjoy thus intellectual companionship.

n  

“Almost everybody in the neighbourhood had ‘troubles,’ frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had ‘complications.’ To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death-warrant. People struggled on for years with ‘troubles,’ but they almost always succumbed to ‘complications.”

“There was no way out—none. He was a prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished.”

“If I missed my train where’d I go?’
‘Where are you going if you catch it?”

n

I have been on a bit of a four-star roll recently and am beginning to fear that I accidentally pressed against my generous ratings button when I was slumped against the bookcase last week trying to figure out what to read next. It's cold and dreary outside and I was seeking something warm and fuzzy, maybe a bit light hearted or some sort of serial fantasy to see me through the onset of the winter months.... and then my hand brushed by the spine of Ethan Frome...

Which is clearly none of the things I was looking for but I picked it up and read it anyway and so here we are. I actually managed to finish it in one day thanks to the relentlessly long commute to the office which was made even longer by the delay on the return leg when the train in front hit "something". To quote the train driver who made the announcement, "We are delayed due to a collision with an object on the track. At this stage we are hoping it is inanimate." I'm pretty sure most things are inanimate after being hit by a train but there we go.

MISERY

Ethan Frome is a book about chance and misery. Specifically the chances that Ethan Frome had and the misery he subsequently endured because of them. You won't find much happiness here and the relationship between Ethan and his wife Zenobia "Zeena" Frome is a crispy and glacial as a winter in Starkfield , where the novella is set, although on the plus side this then makes the current temperatures here in Liverpool seem positively tropical. A loveless marriage to an ailing wife and back breaking work on a profitless few acres of farm land have transformed Ethan Frome into an old man at the age of 28. Wharton characterises him in such a way that you immediately imagine someone much older. Like Father Time.

DOGS BOTTOM

The Frome fortunes change when Mattie arrives at the farm. Ethan's heart starts to defrost and that is when the trouble starts. Old Mrs Frome might be an ailing hypochondriac with a face as puckered as a dogs bottom, but she's got two eyes in her head and make no mistake about it. And what she sees is her husband developing an attachment to the hired help. From this point forward there is a swathe of eye lash fluttering, breathless outdoor encounters of the non coital kind and lots of blushing across the kitchen table or the milk pan or the barn door and wherever else country folks go to do their blushing. Of course you know it will all come to a sticky end so don't read on if the lover's final act is still unknown to you.

DEATH BY SLED

Not for Ms Wharton the conventional drinking of poison, trapped and drowning beneath the ice on a frozen New England pond, or shot gun to the temple. You've got two lovers ready to make the ultimate leap together and a lot of snow. Snow plus suicide = sled, obviously. There has been much scoffing at the this method of delivering an untimely demise to the protagonist, and yes, I may be scoffing a tiny bit too. On the other hand I have been on this kind of sled and actually took one down the black ski run on a mountain in Austria once. One of the guys I was with planted his sled half way up a tree and broke his arm. The other guy went off a cliff. Not a massive cliff admittedly but big enough to probably ensure a little bit of wee came out. So death by sled is entirely probable, just more difficult to successfully engineer and a little more uncommon these days.

LOVE THE ONE YOU'RE WITH
It turns out that death by sled really isn't easy at all and even seasoned sled driver Ethan fails to pull it off leaving Ethan, Mattie and Zeena locked together on the Frome farm each nursing their own ailments and bitter disfigurements as well as being the talk of the local town and, within the framework of the story, the subject of intrigue whenever a nosey newcomer arrives in town.

If it sounds like I didn't enjoy this, then don't be fooled because I really did. Wonderfully written, beautiful descriptions of the Massachusetts landscape and all in one novella sized package. I've now downloaded the rest of the Wharton back catalogue so expect an onslaught of all things Edith soon.

I woke up this morning and decided to pick up a small, cozy, cute little book. The cover for Ethan Frome was perfect! Snowy, just like what I was seeing outside. I brewed some coffee and kicked back, not realizing that the cover was meant to represent a New England winter.

Honestly, I could cut it right there. I just spiraled down into sadness and melancholy. I was frustrated and angry, wanting to put down the book and walk away, but not being able to justify doing so with a 99-page work. Ethan! Give me a HUG! I also found it fascinating that Edith Wharton had the capability of capturing the male psyche so crisply, blatantly throwing up the middle finger at the hackneyed “Write what you know”.

Yeah… this was not the cozy Sunday I had imagined. Thanks Edith.

In trappola

Il New England rurale, neve, freddo, neve, desolazione, neve, ghiaccio, neve, gelo, neve, tempeste di neve, neve, tanta neve, fanno da sfondo a un triangolo amoroso: Ethan, Zeena, Mattie.
Quello che divampa tra Ethan e Mattie sarà un amore impossibile, dai risvolti tragici, che condannerà Frome a un inesorabile e interminabile inverno del cuore.

Sembrava parte di quel paesaggio muto e malinconico, un’incarnazione del suo gelido dolore, con tutto quel che di caloroso e sensibile c’era in lui ben sepolto sotto la superficie; il suo silenzio però non aveva niente di ostile.

Ma quanta sofferenza può sopportare un essere umano? Quanta desolazione? Quanto sacrificio?
Edith Warthon ha dato un volto e un nome al dolore: Ethan Frome.
Romanzo breve, intenso, straziante.

https://youtu.be/1FSU_EJjp3s

Just when you think that it's safe to kiss someone you're not married to, just then, disaster lurks barely a sledge ride away!

Ethan Frome is remarkable, in probability wrongly, in my mind for its relentless bleakness. This is an American novella, by an American author in which there is no escape. The West is there, but the protagonist can't afford the journey. This an impoverished landscape, the modest hero ploughs an infertile furrow. An ungallant way to refer to a marriage, but there you go, in Ethan Frome marriage is duty, more burdensome than most. A best pickle dish is too precious to use and when broken is carried out with as much solemnity as a dead body, perhaps more. The consequences of sin are life long, while grace, let alone redemption, are entirely absent. Then again perhaps it is natural if in a country there is an overwhelming belief in optimism, expansion, and the possibility of forever starting again that a contrasting voice emerges that says 'yes, that may well be the American dream, but this is the American reality'.

Very oddly Ethan Frome reminds me of The Great Gatsby and those "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past". There some surface glitter covered over an essential immobility that here is plain and unvarnished. This stands in contrast to relentless reinvention, a rootlessness that allows renewal, the kind of thing we see in Sister Carrie the woman from the back of beyond becoming a star of the New York stage.

This seems to be a dying society on the edges of buoyant country. The narrator's opening remarks talk of the natives, like Frome, and the later emigrants. Although the narrator seem to approve of the old blood, the implication of the story is that they are an evolutionary dead end. Too tied down to achieve anything new. The need to take a trip by horse drawn vehicle to the train station suggests this is a stagnating backwater, cut off from the energetic currants of the nineteenth century let alone those of the twentieth. If the present does reach into the town it is only through the patent medicines that validates Zenobia Frome's status as being perpetually sick.

This work that Lisa Simpson was so pleased to gain a copy of to call her own is like a little piece of Thomas Hardy, transplanted to New England. A corner of a foreign field that is for ever Wessex.

Well-written and quite tragic. I wondered if the ending might have been different if the characters lived in another time. I also pondered how being poor means having fewer choices, especially when contemplating making life changes.

For me, this novel is not Wharton’s best work, but still scores an easy 4 stars. She is that great.
Ethan Frome is a farmer married to a woman he dislikes so intensely that he blows out the candle before undressing so he doesn’t have to look at her when he gets into bed.
And Zenobia is truly horrible. She’s a manipulative, self-absorbed, black hole of negativity who suffers from vaguely described “shooting pains” that keep her from doing any real work. Partly to help Zeena out, the couple brings her cousin, Mattie Silver, to live with them and within a few months Ethan is passionately in love with her. It’s clear that Zenobia is fully aware of Ethan’s feelings, although she never says a word, and all that’s unspoken between the three of them makes the novel enormously suspenseful. Finally, Zenobia makes her move. After visiting a doctor in the next town she tells Ethan her diagnosis.

“I’ve got complications,” she said.
Ethan knew the word for one of exceptional import. Almost everybody in the neighborhood had “troubles” but only the chosen had “complications.” To have them was … in most cases a death warrant. Ethan’s heart was jerking to and fro between two extremities of feeling, but for the moment compassion prevailed. His wife looked so hard and lonely sitting there in the darkness with such thoughts …
“You must do just what [the doctor] tells you,” Ethan answered sympathetically.
She was still looking at him. “I mean to,” she said. He was struck by a new note in her voice, it was neither whining nor reproachful, but dryly resolute.
“And what does he want you should do?” he asked with a mounting vision of fresh expenses.
“He wants I should have a hired girl.”

In other words, Mattie has to leave since Zeena needs someone who can truly “do for her.” She hired a girl on the way back from the doctor’s and Mattie’s departure is to take place the next day.
It’s such a small thing—a young woman moving away from her cousin’s house—yet in Wharton’s masterful hands it takes on profound and universal importance. The rest of the novel moves forward with a horrible inevitability and even though I pretty much knew what was going to happen, I kept irrationally hoping that it would go differently for all of them. The ending reveals a really sad twist that I didn’t see coming.
Wharton often names her characters in ways that cleverly indicates their role, and this novel is no exception. The word “Fromm” means “honorable” or “pious” in German, and honor is perhaps Ethan’s most prominent quality. It’s also what's responsible for his downfall.
The first Zenobia was an ancient warrior queen who is famous for saying, “I am a queen and as long as I live I will reign.” Yup.
But for all of its strengths, I prefer The House of Mirthand The Age of Innocenceto Ethan Frome. All three books are about people who want things they can’t have because of their time and place in history, yet here, the ending relies too much on fate for my taste. The novel feels like a moral tale and that fable-ish quality, combined with a considerable dose of melodrama, robs it of some depth.
Still, there’s plenty here to enjoy.

I'm not really sure what to say about this book. After I finished reading it I proceeded to read all the glowing, rave reviews from my Goodread friends and members and quite frankly, I just don't get why all the glowing, rave reviews! Seriously.

I had to stop and start again because I was bored senseless. What tedious dribble. My goodness! The only way I powered through was because I had a doctor's appointment and this was the only book I brought with me. It started to get only slightly better in the middle and I did enjoy the peculiar ending but for the most part it was a hard book to get through.

That said, for me the book was filled with crazy, self serving characters. Poor Ethan! Married to a woman who took wonderful care of his mother when she was dying. The mother dies, winter comes, so what the heck, Ethan and Zeena got married. It's a loveless marriage because Zeena is sick all the time. Poor Ethan! Enter Mattie! Love triangle!

This is the third book I've read by Edith Wharton. The others that I read by her were The Age of Innocence and The Custom of the Country. All were three star reads. I guess you could say that I'm not a fan...

Magnificent, spectacular... I somehow always feel I must assign many types of superlatives to the magnificent & spectacular Edith Wharton! Definitely top ten writers of ALL TIME contender. Her best is "Age of Innocence," & her not-as-much (personally, alas) is "House of Mirth", but sandwiched between them is this tense novella about the restrictions of "unconventional" feeling. & it has the type of invigorating force that compels the reader to do his one job and do it good. I adore this slim tome, admire Wharton for being absolutely angelic literature-wise in her rare & immense perfection.