Edith Wharton's Writing Style Plus Female Bonding

And it’s back to sepulchral skies, the waft of invisible crematoriums, and perpetual low-grade headache.

“This is our new reality!” snaps New York Governor Kathy Hochul.

Remind me again: How does it help your political ambitions to shake your finger at us like a stern schoolmarm, Governor Hochul?

Meanwhile, let’s all look on the bright side! We can stare at the sun for hours, and it won’t fuck up our retinas!

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Anyway.

I scribbled all morning long and well into the afternoon yesterday.

In the second draft, I’m gonna have to make the nature of the archived materials more ambiguous—are they letters to a mysterious person, or are they a rough draft of an unpublished ghost story?

Because the first scene in my story within the story unambiguously establishes the existence of a ghost. So, that can’t be the mystery.

Plus, the first-person sections pack a lot of info: They must tell the complete story of the appearance of the priest’s ghost at the Mills Mansion 20 years before Ogden Mills commits the act, which motivates this haunting. They must also tell the story of Mills’ attempted seduction of EW and why she makes the Mills Mansion the scene of Lily Bart’s downfall.

And I may have to reread (or re-skim) The Age of Innocence, after all, to get a betterhandle on EW’s writing style.

What I wrote yesterday reads kinda like Edgar Allen Poe—first translated into French and then translated back into English by someone who didn’t know Poe originally wrote in that language.

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Wharton’s actual writing style is surprisingly modern.

Except that she wrote before Hemingway changed the rules of literature, so she uses a lot more adjectives than contemporary readers are comfortable with. Also—save in The Custom of the Country (the closest Wharton ever came to writing satire)—she hardly ever uses metaphors or similes.

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Four or five weeks ago, I read Hernan Diaz’s Trust.

It didn’t make much of an impression on me.

So, I read a bunch of reviews to figure out what I had missed: Trust won this year’s Pulitzer Prize, after all.

A significant number of those reviews cited Diaz’s imitation of Edith Wharton in the opening section of Trust as a particular source of delight. All I could think was no, no, no, no, NO. For anyone who actually knows Wharton, Diaz’s voice in that opening section is nothing like Wharton’s. Sentences are wayyyy too short for one thing. Also, Wharton was never particularly interested in the use of euphemism as a linguistic means of preserving appearances.

All this a convoluted way of noting I could probably get away with writing my first-person sections in any voice I liked: If I said it was Edith Wharton’s voice, nobody would argue.

But I’m not gonna do that!

‘Cause I’m a fuckin’ priestess to my craft!

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After I wrote for a while, I toddled off to the garden and played in the dirt for a couple of hours.

My pollinator garden is finally in bloom:



And despite the attention I paid to spacing seeds and seedlings when I first planted them, they are wayyy too close to each other now.

See how that bean vine is strangling that tomato plant?



I harvested a whole bunch of lettuce and then played Lady Bountiful, delivering lettuce and goodwill to all of my neighbors— Well. At least to the neighbors I know.



At Casa Neighbor Ed, Pat and I bonded over the latest ain’t-it-awful on the L front:
“She made me take her to the grocery store so she could return some grapes!” Pat said.

“OmyGAWD!” I said. “I went out shopping for her! She wrote ‘grapes tomatoes’ on her shopping list! I thought she wanted grapes and tomatoes!”

“I know,” Pat said. “She wanted to complain about you to me. I shut her right down.”

“How was I to know she meant the little red tomatoes? The little red tomatoes are called cherry tomatoes!”

“I know!” Pat said.

We laughed and laughed.

“It’s been about a month now since her operation,” I said. “If this is the level of independence she’s comfortable with achieving, I think it may be time for us to indoctrinate her in the mysteries of Instacart.”

We laughed some more!

It felt good to be bonding with Pat! I think she used to feel suspicious of me—like why is this woman so friendly with my husband?

But I don’t think she feels that way anymore.