A review by samhsiung
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

3.0

I wish Newland Archer wasn’t so hittable (I wrote “hateable” at first, which got autocorrected into “hittable,” but I’m not mad about it) of a character because it really made me not want to continue reading the book. I honestly felt like the book was supposed to read as satire—Newland, throughout the entire book, was basically just like “Do you know what I know that you know that I know that you are thinking?” What if all the unspoken rules of upper-class New York society were just imagined in Newland’s head... He jumps to assumptions faster than the amount of time it takes for me to fall asleep in class. Bro is just monologuing in third-person for 75% of the book and thinking that he is the shit. Props to Wharton for making him so hittable, but I think there’s a certain threshold of hittableness that you shouldn’t cross, and she definitely crossed it. Maybe it’s partly because I had just finished reading Barchester Towers when starting this book (which has very strong characters), but I found the other characters in this book to be somewhat lackluster. I felt like I was being character-bombed in the beginning of the novel, and some of the characters were just so unmemorable that it got to a point where I just gave up on looking at the Wikipedia character summaries and moved on with my life not being able to attribute character names to their traits. Maybe Wharton intended it to partly be a reflection of what this book discusses so much—the sameness and repetitiveness of upperclass New York society in the 1870s—but there are ways to make even boring characters memorable. The only three characters of this book I remember are May Welland, Ellen Olenska, and Newland Archer—which makes sense because their love triangle was the center of the novel—and I’m remembering Mrs Manson Mingott now, who was just constantly fat-shamed throughout the entire book. As for the plot, I feel like it took 100 pages for the plot to actually pick up speed. I would’ve dropped this book after 50 pages if I wasn’t reading it for class. All of this being said, I think the one thing that I thought was good was the writing style. There is no denying that she has writing talent—it’s just the slow plot and annoying asf character(s) that made me want to bash myself in the head.