Sunday Morning! “Ethan Frome” by Edith Wharton

Rufus F.

Rufus is a likeable curmudgeon. He has a PhD in History, sang for a decade in a punk band, and recently moved to NYC after nearly two decades in Canada. He wrote the book "The Paris Bureau" from Dio Press (2021).

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10 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    The part of the book that I remember was the meal of “pickles and donuts”.

    The teacher explained to us that this was symbolism.

    It was then that I thought “yeah, this book sucks.”Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to Jaybird says:

      I didn’t think it sucked. I just found it a little off-putting how *obvious* the moral dilemma was. I was waiting for a scene in which we’d see how much the wife still loved him, or how deeply hurt she was by how her life turned out. But, nah, she’s pretty much a one-note “battle axe” throughout. So, he has to choose between a vibrant young girl who loves him, or the ol’ ball and chain. This would have been the point where Raymond Chandler would have “brought out the guy with the gun.”Report

  2. InMD says:

    Marriage is a tough topic for art I think because it’s so much easier to identify what doesn’t work than what does. We all know the people in various flavors of dysfunctional marriages, including those that somehow remain in tact.

    What would be a great trick would be something that makes the case for it that isn’t either reactionary or unrealistically sentimental. The closest I can think of that kind of gets there is a rom-com called Friends With Kids that I sat through one night when I had insomnia and literally nothing else was on. It looks like it has mixed reviews but I thought it hit a lot of the right, and very adult notes in favor of marriage in the modern world, especially for those who don’t think they need it.

    But it’s interesting to see we’ve been deconstructing this since well before we all became deconstructionists.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to InMD says:

      I’ve started watching Ingmar Bergman’s televisions series Scenes from a Marriage, from 1973, which really covers a *lot* of what happens in married life, although rumor has it the Swedish divorce rate skyrocketed when it was first shown.

      I feel like marriage is one of those unsolvable problems it’s worth spending your life working on, although I find that’s not a propular view!Report

  3. LeeEsq says:

    Most not very online people still hold onto the meteorological theory of climate. It’s why we have have ideas like the spicy Latina or why Japanese people people see Okinawans as more free-going and informal than the people from Tokyo. There is probably some truth to this idea but using this as policy basis led to all sorts of bad stuff.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to LeeEsq says:

      I think part of what’s made it marginal in the current age is also that living in one place or another is not so different when there’s air-conditioning and heating. It’s not so different being in an apartment in Norway or Spain now.Report

  4. LeeEsq says:

    If you have two cute lap dogs on your shoulders and three cute lap dogs in your arms and you are still unhappy, I’m not sure if anything can be done with you.Report

  5. I’ve never read the book, I did see the film version with Liam Neeson. The ending was far more horrifying than any axe play would have been.

    Also, I disagree about A Handful of Dust. Having Brenda (who like all pretty, popular, unfaithful women in Waugh’s novels is revenge on his first wife) say “Thank God” is more than fairly caustic.Report

    • I’m probably minicing my words there quite a bit. I found the novel (AHOD) kind of horrific for that reason- it just seems like a vicious type of revenge to even write it. Having divorced, I can imagine the urge, but can’t even imagine writing a paragraph about my ex.Report