Book No. 39 of 2025
I picked up The Age of Innocence because it was referenced heavily in The Husband Hunters, and found myself stunned by how good (and delightful, and devastating) of a novel it is. (It’s not required by any means, but I do recommend reading The Husband Hunters or a similar nonfiction book about Gilded Age New York—and the show doesn’t count—before reading this one, because there are so many mentions of stuff-a-modern-reader-might-not-know and characters who, by winking references, are clearly modeled after real-life people.)
Wharton is so shockingly good at articulating what I think of as “inner life” thoughts; so much of what drives the novel is Newland Archer’s internal narrative, and over the course of the book you really feel him becoming wise to the stifling constriction of “society” and its obligations. A lot of the biggest shifts or realizations don’t come at the behest of plot twists, and are more like what Judith Weston would term “emotional events.” It’s also wild to realize how deeply relatable Archer (and Ellen Olenska) are—human nature is the same even when settings and standards change.
I was also reminded of how much I love a yearning, doomed romance; I get so much more out of that quiet aching than I do from any contemporary romance novel. This is a yearn for the ages, and the last paragraph of the book just killed me.
Similar Reads
As mentioned, highly recommend reading Anne de Courcy’s The Husband Hunters right before reading this.
The end has a similar quietly wistful “what could have been” vibe as Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.