Spoilers.

Charity Royall is the child of “mountain people” adopted by a lawyer in the nearby small, poor town of North Dormer. One summer, she has an affair with Lucius Harney, an educated visitor to the town. Bad stuff follows.

This is, I believe, the third book by Edith Wharton I’ve read after Ethan Frome (in high school) and The House of Mirth. While it is the best of the three I’ve read, I honestly don’t think Wharton is my type of writer. I keep trying to give her more chances, but I think this is the end for me.

That’s not to say Summer was bad. It actually wasn’t a terrible book. Charity was an interesting character, a combination of uneducated but aware of her own existence. She knew enough about the world to understand why things would never work out between her and Harney, even if he wanted to make them work. She was aware of her feelings and her passions, and about her situation in life. This is actually the first book by Wharton I’ve read where I felt she had an investment in the characters. They felt real, whereas in the other books I’ve read, they’ve felt like soulless caricatures to me. The other characters were less real (particularly Charity’s adoptive father), but Charity was round.

On the other hand, Wharton’s prose is nearly as flowery and too-descriptive in this novella as it is in her novels, and that gets really tedious to me. My mind always wanders as she spends pages describing architecture or design or nature. But as this was a shorter work, there was proportionately less description. Thankfully.

This book seemed to be primarily about women and the choices they have to make, plus their constraints when it came to their sexuality in contrast to the lack of constraints on men. Let me just say I’m happy I don’t live back then. I’m allowed to think and make decisions for myself. I’m not pressured by what people are going to think about me. Living back then would have been awful.

But while that is the primary focus of the book, that’s not really what I took from it. The one thing that I really got out of this book was the comparison of three different classes of people, and not in the way Wharton intended. There was Lucius Harney, who represented the educated classes. Then there were all the people in North Dormer, the uneducated but at least “civilized” town. And then there were the mountain people, who lived by very animalistic tendencies (according to Wharton’s descriptions of them anyway), in filth and rags, disregarding the law altogether. I don’t know how accurate this portrayal of these people is, but what it really made me feel was this:

No matter how much I try, I cannot understand everyone. I try really hard to learn about various cultures, groups, ethnicities, backgrounds, socioeconomic situations, etc. But reading this book made me realize that I simply cannot know everything. And if I can’t really experience something, I can’t really understand it. It made me feel hopeless and tired, and like I should just give up trying. And I don’t like that it made me feel like that. Rarely do I feel like I should just give up everything that I’m working toward, and that my efforts are pointless. It’s probably for that reason (well, and the messed up ending where Charity marries her adoptive father?? Ew! Creepy!) that I really turned against the book.

So I’m just going to leave Ms. Wharton here. The two of us, we apparently don’t get along. I don’t regret reading Summer, but I look forward to leaving it behind.