Old Favourites

• Author: Lucy Sweeney Byrne
• Date: 19 December 2020
• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

I'm reminded that my individual existence, all my delusions of free will and originality, will amount to no more than a light wind rippling across a field, quickly past, leaving no trace, if even noticed. Yet this knowledge is, to me, a comfort, even a pleasure and is the same feeling I get from looking at the stars: I'm a nothing, unspeakably insignificant yet here I am right now, vibrantly alive.

The Age of Innocence makes me aware of all this because it is, in the end, the perfect novel. It reflects back to its reader, through astoundingly astute descriptions of one society's machinations - in this case Edith Wharton's own upper-class New York milieu of the late 1800s - the age-old patterns of humanity.

By revealing so thoroughly the peculiarities of this set of wealthy families, the novel creates a synecdochical picture of the world and shows us that its subjects belong to an age that, beneath a surface of gentility and kindness, proves no more innocent than any other.

Of course it's...