Reef

Rating:
Summary: Boring
Review: I love Edith Wharton and have read many of her books, but this one is just BORING. It goes on and on and nothing ever happens. If the people in it could just be honest with each other instead of lying to try to avoid confronting difficulties the story would have been a lot better and a lot shorter. It is agonizing to read.

Rating:
Summary: In shallow waters.
Review: The Reef by Edith Wharton, with an introduction by Louis Auchincloss. Recommended.

In his introduction to The Reef, Louis Auchincloss notes that modern readers may not appreciate a moral climate in which a woman opposes her stepson's engagement to a girl who has had an affair with the man the woman is about to marry. The Reef, however, is as concerned with morality as with class.

On his way to France to see his beloved, the widowed Anna Leath, George Darrow receives a telegram telling him not to come "till thirtieth" due to "unexpected obstacle." As time passes and he doesn't receive an explanation for the delay, he experiences growing feelings of disappointment and humiliation. At one point, he imagines the umbrellas and elbows of his fellow travelers saying, "She doesn't want you, doesn't want you, doesn't want you."

As he waits undetermined as to whether to go back to London or to press forward, he encounters Sophy Viner, a recently unemployed servant of a woman whose dinners he once attended. She is on her way to Paris to look up old friends and to pursue a theatrical career. Darrow, who feels sorry for himself and the loss he thinks he is about to suffer, finds himself manipulating Sophy into staying with him to attend the theatre and finally into a short liaison. He is unaware that she has fallen in love with him and his kindness in her hour of uncertainty.

A year later, Anna Leath eagerly anticipates Darrow's arrival, for they are to be married and begin an overseas stint as part of his diplomatic career. She is also excited because her stepson, Owen Leath, wants to do something that they know will upset his aristocratic, old-fashioned grandmother; he wants to marry Anna's daughter's governess, who is none other than Sophy Viner.

Darrow and Sophy's secret is safe with one another, yet Darrow is faced by the uncomfortable fact that the ignorant Anna wants him to support Owen's choice of a woman he knows to be unsuitable but whom he pities. He tries to convince Sophy that Owen is not right for her. "You'd rather I didn't marry any friend of yours," she says "not as a question, but as a mere dispassionate statement of fact." Darrow's lack of feeling and poor conduct make Sophy an undesirable wife for Owen. She is a painful reminder that both of them have broken social conventions.

Auchincloss calls Sophy a "fallen woman" in the context of the times, but this is too simplistic. The real issue with Sophy, both before and after Anna finds out about her relationship with Darrow, is her class and lack of social background. After all, in The House of Mirth, extramarital liaisons are commonplace, understood, and accepted if they are discreet and do not upset the social balance. Within the correct parameters, such affairs become a comfortable topic of gossip and speculation.

Once Anna has finally divined that there has been something between Darrow and Sophy beyond the casual acquaintance previously admitted, he acknowledges it by saying simply, "She has given me up." This does not refer to Sophy's feelings, but to her expectations. Sophy has learned that, in the world she inhabits, the Darrows seek temporary solace from the Sophys, but permanence and stability from the Annas.

The issue that Anna keeps returning to is not that Darrow has deeper feelings for Sophy, but that Sophy has been there before, whether it is to the theatre with Darrow or in Darrow's arms--. True, the liaison happened while he was on his way to Anna and she is bothered by that, but it does not dwell so much in her thoughts as that the kiss he places on her neck has also landed on Sophy's-and that Sophy has been even more intimate with him than she has. Anna asks Darrow, "Do such things happen to men often?" (phrased passively, as though Darrow had been the pursued rather than the pursuer). "I don't know what happens to other men. Such a thing never happened to me . . ." The "thing" here is not the physical aspect of the relationship. Even the "fine" Anna knows that he has indulged because one of his relationships, with a mutual acquaintance named Kitty, drove her away from him in their youth. The fact is that this relationship is outside their social sphere and reflects a lack of discretion that may make him an unsuitable husband and stepparent.

Sophy, with her finely tuned perceptions, her delicacy, her generosity, and her genuine feelings (Darrow assures Anna that she is no adventuress, which Anna wants her to be), does not deserve her fate. She goes off to India to return to the service of Mrs. Murrett. In one of the weaknesses of The Reef, Anna's encounter with Sophy's fat, frowsy, common sister and her equally common lover, Jimmy Brance, puts the noble Sophy in her proper place for both Anna and the reader.

The Reef is in shallower waters than The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence, and its structure is weakened by a forced reliance on dialogue. A large part of the final third consists of various characters talking to Anna in her room, coming and going what may as well be a revolving door. Sophy's fate further weakens the drama. Yet, who but Wharton could write, "Her frugal silence mocked his prodigality of hopes and fears"? Such elegant prose and insights alone distinguish The Reef.

(As an aside, it would be interesting if, in the same fashion Jean Rhys gave Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre "a life," a writer were to do the same for Sophy, whose viewpoint is never shown.)

Diane L. Schirf, 7 July 2003.

Rating:
Summary: Dry + Narrow = Darrow?
Review: Try as I may, I can't understand why Mrs. Wharton is so sympathetic towards the heroine's lover, George Darrow. But then again, I am not a Wharton scholar, having read only a few of the author's novels (The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, etc.) Darrow is opportunistic, thoughtless, and uncaring. Add to that a healthy dose of hypocrisy to boot. And yet Mrs. Wharton persists in her goal of allowing him and the heroine, Anna Leath, to come together. Anna, much like May Archer in "the Age of Innocence",is a very "proper" upper-class society woman with beauty, education, family, and distinction. And about as bland as plain porridge. What she lacks is decisiveness and character to let such an odious individual as Darrow to court and marry her for his pleasure of "being seen in public with her." Their mutual love interest, dating from the time before her first marriage, is as exciting as lukewarm tea. On the other hand, Sophy Viner, like other unconventional heroines in the Wharton gallery such as the lovely Countess Olenska, gets seduced and then sacrificed to the cruel realities of the "vulgar" world. That's a shame, because she is the only character who shone through with spirit, warmth, and sincerity. One can blame her youthfulness for her "admiration of hideous pictures" and her bad choice of Darrow as the object of her whole-hearted passion. In the end, Anna and Darrow got what they deserved -- lifetime boredom in each other's company. Mrs. Wharton's novels might make a statement about society in the early 1900's, but her characters speak loud and clear about the gender and class stereotypes in which the author herself held women and men.

Rating:
Summary: One of Wharton's greatest sequences
Review: Whatever you think of "The Reef," it contains one of Edith Wharton's most wonderful scenes. Our "hero" has been dallying for a while in a hotel with the young girl he picked up on the boat dock, and he's wearying of her. We see his boredom and disillusionment through his reactions to the mere sounds she is making in the next room. He is so familiar by now with her habits and movements that he knows what she's doing without actually seeing her. A gem of a scene, in a strange jewel of a book.

Rating:
Summary: One of Wharton's greatest sequences
Review: Whatever you think of "The Reef," it contains one of Edith Wharton's most wonderful scenes. Our "hero" has been dallying for a while in a hotel with the young girl he picked up on the boat dock, and he's wearying of her. We see his boredom and disillusionment through his reactions to the mere sounds she is making in the next room. He is so familiar by now with her habits and movements that he knows what she's doing without actually seeing her. A gem of a scene, in a strange jewel of a book.

Rating:
Summary: Moving...
Review: While "The Reef" is to my mind not on par with her other great works, it is nonetheless an entirely worthwhile read. The emotional drama is compelling, palpable, devastating. Altogether engrossing. The descriptive scenes are for the most part not as sharp as they might be, but the power of the novel lies in its dialogue-- in what is said, but more often what is not said. It concerns the inability to express in any meaningful fashion those things that most matter, the agony of non-expression as much as the agony of the primary feelings themselves. I enter, perhaps, too easily into the emotions of what are, after all, only fictional characters, but I was moved to tears by certain passages, on account of the emotional rawness that underlies the attempts to preserve decorum. A good novel, and thoroughly enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: Flawed Characters= realism; Great Characterization & Setting
Review: Yes, Wharton was just a tad mean and crude in writing the male counterpart of this book, but that's what makes this book so interesting. These characters had flaws! Actually flaws! I am so sick of reading books with perfect little characters with just one evil villian. This book shows you that no one is perfect, and everyone has a little evil in them.

A charming, poetic, lyrical, and beautiful book to read. Wonderful descriptions, vivid images, lovely constructed sentences.

The cover of THE REEF is also beautiful. The text and lay out enhances the story, the elegance of the past, the wrong and the right. The cover was also rather of a matte type of thing, not glossy, which reminds the reader of ceramic and the older days when they turn the pages and old the book open.

Another lovely read by my favorite female author of the 20th century, Edith Wharton.