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Title: Rosebud does them in
Review: Plowing through this novel was as arduous and monotonous as the long snowy carriage rides from Ethan's homestead to the town of Starkfield. Did I just complete a grueling meditation retreat? It was mercifully short, though, not even 140 pages, and it does offer glimmers of intellectual satisfaction amidst the text's long zazen session. Most of the character descriptions pop off the page with vividness. Mattie's way of "throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out" was pure literary gold, and the various ponderous descriptions of Ethan's countenance, that he had a "moral isolation too remote for casual access" and could feel "huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things" served as charitable descriptions of a man with Job-like tragedy in his life. Overall, if you are budgeting just one Edith Wharton novel for your reading list, I wouldn't choose Ethan Frome.
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