June 5, 2023 Writers' Houses Trespassing on Edith Wharton By Alissa Bennett Edith Wharton’s house, The Mount, Lenox, Massachusetts. Margaret Helminska, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. I work in a blue-chip gallery, and it’s not unusual that I’m asked if I grew up in Newport when I say that I’m from Rhode Island. It often feels like a loaded question, more social barometer than casual inquiry, and it’s clear that my response will either indicate our mutual class affiliation or amplify the differences that I already know exist between us. Sometimes I can see the flare of pleasure that people feel when they say “Newport,” the word conjuring, as it must, visions of sailboats and private beaches, country clubs and rocky cliffs thrashed by the waves of a restless Atlantic. I always sense that there’s a secret on the other side of the inquiry, but I guess I will never know exactly what it is; I grew up half an hour west of Bellevue Avenue in a modest split-level ranch that my father built. I’ve seen only small slices of those gated houses, the quick flashes of stone and shingle that are revealed through a break in the trees. Read More
April 21, 2023 The Review’s Review Divorcée Fiction: On Ursula Parrott By Alissa Bennett Russell Patterson, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I’d never heard of Ursula Parrott when McNally Editions introduced me to Ex-Wife, the author’s 1929 novel about a young woman who suddenly finds herself suspended in the caliginous space between matrimony and divorce. The first thing I wondered was where it had been all my life. Ex-Wife rattles with ghosts and loss and lonely New York apartments, with men who change their minds and change them again, with people and places that assert their permanence by the very fact that they’re gone and they’re never coming back. Originally published anonymously, Ex-Wife stirred immediate controversy for Parrott’s frank depiction of her heroine, Patricia, a woman whose allure does not spare her from desertion after an open marriage proves to be an asymmetrical failure. Embarking on a marathon of alcoholic oblivion and a series of mostly joyless dips into the waters of sexual liberation, Patricia spends the book ricocheting between her fear of an abstract future and her fixation on a past that has been polished, gleaming from memory’s sleight of hand. It’s been nearly a century since Ex-Wife had its flash of fame (the book sold more than one hundred thousand copies in its first year), and as progress has stripped divorce of its moral opprobrium, it has also swelled the ranks of us ex-wives. Folded in with Patricia’s descriptions of one-night stands and prohibition-busting binges are the kind of hollow distractions relatable to any of us who have ever wanted to forget: she buys clothes she can’t afford; she gets facials and has her hair done; she listens to songs on repeat while wearily wondering why heartache always seems to bookend love. My copy is riddled with exclamation marks and anecdotes that chart my own parallel romantic catastrophes, its paragraphs vandalized with highlighted passages and bracketed phrases. There is a sentence on the book’s first page that I outlined in black ink: “He grew tired of me;” it reads, “hunted about for reasons to justify his weariness; and found them.” The box that I have drawn around these words is a frame, I suppose; the kind that you find around a mirror. Read More