Edith Wharton’s pet subjects — failed marriages, social minefields, and stymied dreams — play out against the backdrop of the Great War. As always, Wharton’s prose beautifully combines criticism with compassion, lyricism with clarity, and subtlety with wrenching drama. I found myself re-reading passages and just sighing.

The set up for this novel hooked me before I even read it: In the summer of 1914, a divorced expatriate father living in Paris is anticipating a month’s travel with his son, George. Adding a rosy glow to the prospect is the father’s recent success as an artist after years of struggle, which means he’ll finally be able to support his son financially. After all, he wants George to be “independent” and not have to work in some soul-destroying business such as the son's stepfather owns — such a nice touch to combine class snobbery and whiff-of-Bohemian artistic snobbery!

Anyway, war breaks out and prevents the father/son vacation, but the big crisis is that George can be drafted into the French army because he was born while his parents were visiting France. Oh, the twists of fate. This danger forces the ex-husband, ex-wife, and her second husband (who essentially reared George) into an uneasy collaboration to protect the son, without his knowing it, from active duty. The three parents scramble and scheme to pull every string they have to get George behind a desk, but, to everyone’s amazement and horror, George enlists. The mother is devastated; the fathers are secretly proud. (And the reader isn't surprised as that's the title of the novel.) The bulk of the story concerns the agonies of parents waiting on the home front, a situation more complex because of the divorce and the weirdness of being foreigners in a country at war.

Wharton explores the human psyche with such unrelenting perception that it’s almost painful. So many times I wanted to reach into the book and shake the characters even as I ached for them. You yearn for these people to rise above their petty concerns, but, as in real life, people usually fall short. However, Wharton is a genius at portraying the moments of connection that offer transcendence. For instance, both men know the wife isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer and needs to be handled carefully (though they can’t say it aloud), both have a father’s love for George, and both have a conflicted admiration for George’s willingness to fight. I wanted the characters to burst into soulful, lushly orchestrated duets about their differing roles, but Wharton doesn’t provide musical theatre, just realistic insight, and so the result is more exploratory than cathartic.

Edith Wharton lived in Paris during the Great War and drove an ambulance to and from the front, so she writes with nuance and authority on the issues of being American in Paris during the years before the U.S. entered the war. Mostly, though, I enjoyed a personal and family saga that gives insight into both a vanished social context and universal experiences.

A fine novel, under appreciated for too many years (even now, almost twenty years after its republication). Wharton writes about the part of World War I she knew the best, the life at the rear of the conflict, in Paris, including the charity work, the many, many people who continually receive news that their sons have died in the conflict, and artistic and social life. The editor of this edition, in her introduction, says that in this novel Wharton lays out her idea of the role of intellectuals in wartime and, I think, this is partly true. But I also think she misreads the text by using as her main example the "Friends of French Art" charity as depicted in the book. Much of Wharton's subtle satire is, in fact, directed at this group even before it switches hands and aims toward the end. The artists and intellectuals surrounding the protagonist Campton, she makes clear, are more interested in following fads and fashions than in actually doing war work (and this includes the protagonist, who is not shown wholly in a positive light). It is this tension in the plot that provides the story arc and the eventual shifting of Campton's thoughts and opinions about the war as he experiences the agony of having his son serving at the front. This is not a novel that is on a par with some of Wharton's others, but it is a good book that deals with issues that don't often appear in the "canon" of World War I literature.

Very rarely do I come along such a beautiful novel. I loved the author's style. She was very clear and it flowed well.
This novel is about a father's priorities for his son, but once he enters WW11, those priorities explode and the father is devastated. The father is very pessimistic and anti-war and his attitude reminds me of the current feelings concern the Iraqi war.

I am in love with this one :)

Actually I didn't finish this; thus, I gave it the benefit of the doubt and 3 stars. It isn't a bad book at all; Edith Wharton writes too beautifully and with so much insight into people that she isn't going to have written a bad book. And all of her books move slowly with a great deal of character development and detailed settings and time periods. But this book just bored me. I can uderstand why it had been forgotten and out of publication for many years, and was not at all popular at the time she wrote it either. They felt that her readers were simply tired of the War and wanted to move on and that was the reason for the low readership. I don't think so. I was interested while I was actually reading it, but I could walk away from it for days at a time without wanting to pick it up.

I think it's entirely possible Wharton wrote at least most of this WWI novel before the war was over - at any rate, it was first published just three months afterwards, in January 1919. This book is so far from the Wharton with which I was familiar - no tale of society and class shenanigans, or romantic situations. Instead, it's the story of an American painter living in Paris, who on one fateful day in late July, 1914, was preparing to take a trip with his son only to have it interrupted by a war nobody believed would happen until the last possible moment.

Wharton, who lived in Paris at the time - and in fact had her own summer vacation curtailed by the war's outbreak - captures the disparate feelings of people at the time. Nobody could believe the powers that were would let this thing happen, and when it did happen, many were at least as upset at the way it changed their own plans as at the fact of the war itself. Campton, the main character, had been in France when his wife of the time - they were later divorced - gave birth to his son George. This made George a French citizen as well as American, and thus he was called up to the Army.

Wharton skillfully keeps Campton at the front of the story - see what I did there? - and keeps us as in the dark about George's experiences as he was most of the time. Throughout the three plus years of the novel's time frame - it ends shortly after American soldiers arrive in France to fight in summer 1917 - we experience the constantly shifting understanding of the public and especially Campton as to everybody's role in the war. I've read plenty about WWI, but I've never read anything that is so focused on the effects on civilian life in a city so close to the front.

So many times, I thought I knew what would happen next, and then Wharton made me think it wouldn't, and then it usually did, allowing me to have my breath taken away. There is an extraordinary sentence uttered by a character who was having an affair with George - I was never happy enough to be so unhappy now. Has a certain kind of loss ever been so complexly yet perfectly expressed?

A very touching book by a magnificent writer.

Free download available at Project Gutenberg

3* The House of Mirth
5* The Age of Innocence
4* Bunner Sisters
4* Ethan Frome
4* Summer
4* The Custom of the Country
3* The Reef
2* Madame de Treymes
3* The Quicksand
3* The House Of The Dead Hand
4* The Glimpses of the Moon
4* Afterward
3* Xingu
2* Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort
4* The Touchstone
3* Writing a War Story
3* A Motor-Flight Through France
3* The Shadow of a Doubt: A Play in Three Acts
4* Au temps de l'innocence
4* The Marne
4* A Son at the Front
TR Twilight Sleep
TR The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
TR The Writing of Fiction
TR The Buccaneers
TR The Fruit of the Tree
TR In Morocco

The war was three months old--three centuries. By virtue of some gift of adaptation which seemed forever to discredit human sensibility, people were already beginning to live into the monstrous idea of it, acquire its ways, speak its language, regard it as a thinkable, endurable, arrangeable fact; to eat it by day, and sleep on it--yes, and soundly--at night.
The war went on; life went on...


A really good--if lesser known--Wharton novel that captures great truths about war and how we adapt; fathers and sons; divorce and its legacy; and a bunch of things I'm not remembering right now, all tackled with Wharton's insightful and beautiful prose.

Wharton put every part of her experience living in Paris during the war into this novel. It is so vividly written, so painful and beautiful. It stands with any of the best writing about the Great War.

Set during WWI in Europe with an artistic back drop beginning in Montmarte, reading between the lines, the book has an antiwar theme, while the privileged continue as they have always but with the nuisance of war.

4.5*

the first Edith Wharton novel with a character that I disliked so much it colored my judgement of the entire novel, John Campton, in my opinion, is a self-centered and disagreeable character. If Wharton intended this kind of reaction, I would consider the novel a success .. If not, I will just retreat to 'Ethan Frome'...and delight in the obvious.

Whew. This was about as heavy as I expected an Edith Wharton WWI novel to be. Understandably, the most likeable characters were all young soldiers, generally described as both beautific and boyish, and, in my opinion, Brant, the long suffering and devoted stepfather. The three parents of George, titular son at the front are Campton, an aging and rather prickly artist, Julia, a rather vapid society lady, and Brant, her second husband, who is rich and worldly but also has a long track record of adoring his stepson and doing whatever he can for him. Campton is EXTREMELY possessive of George, and jealous of his time and attention, to the point of being quite vicious to Brant at various points, including getting angry at Brant for having emotional responses to something happening to George, and being angry at Brant for wanting to have a drawing of George he had made (which he was going to sell anyway??? This man. Ugh.).
I think some parts of the book hit a bit differently since covid, the parts about people in Paris getting deadened to worry and stress about bad news, and their varying levels of earnestness and hypocrisy in how they carry on with their lives.
I liked Wharton's characteristic cynicism about the upper class charity workers and events, they felt really true, and, I suspect, based on some of her lived experiences in Paris during WWI.