Book Reviews
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(Audio version.) Anna Fields reads this edition with precision. The novel's premise is simple: a man and a woman who are financially strapped decide to marry to remain in the high society circles to which they have become accustomed. They will use their wedding gifts to better position one another's opportunity to remarry for money. The dilemma, of course, comes when they discover separately that their love for each other is far greater than the false, pretentious, and self-indulgent lives they are seeking. Wharton strikes a balance between the superficial and the genuine, and between dependency and freedom that allows the reader to observe the foibles and follies of life and learn from them.
Library Journal
Wharton's novel opens with a sentence that seems to have been written for the opening voice-over of a movie: "It rose for them—their honeymoon—over the waters of a lake so famed as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather proud of not having been afraid to choose it as the setting of their own." But Nick and Susy Lansing, each suffering from a genteel lack of money, have married out of convenience rather than romantic rapture. Intending to live off the generosity of wealthy acquaintances, they have also agreed that each shall be free to pursue a more socially desirable mate. What they didn't anticipate is that they would fall genuinely in love with each other. As Wharton tells their story, the sharp irony of both her prose and her characters bleeds into pools of true feeling.
Kirkus Reviews