After three recent experiences (The Touchstone, The Glimpses of the Moon, and Summer), I've become quite a fan of Edith Wharton's incisive character studies and masterful depictions of tragic dilemmas.

This one, published in 1928 to considerable acclaim, offers up another beautifully observed situation, with an immaculate combination of tragedy and satire. Even its irritating aspects (I'll come to them in a minute) didn't detract from what is a very memorable book.

It's another novel that's partly set in Venice, which is how I arrived at it. The city doesn't, in fact, get much of a look-in, but never mind.

Martin Boyne, 46, is a bit of a wanderer. His profession has kept him on the move (he's a civil engineer), and he has travelled for pleasure as well. We meet him as he's about to leave Algiers to sail to Venice. He's intending to meet up with Rose Sellars, an old friend. He last saw her back in New York where she lived with her husband, but she's now a widow, and lives in the Dolomites. He wonders what might lie ahead.

Into that fairly basic question erupts a family, also sailing to Venice. Boyne's attention is first attracted by "a young woman -- a slip of a girl, rather". Remember this phrasing. His inability to decide whether this is "a young woman" or "a slip of a girl" is going to be a crucial theme.

It turns out that she's Judith Wheater, and she's part of a big, incredibly complicated family, which it takes him several conversations to figure out. Some of its members Boyne already knows. He was at Harvard with Cliffe Wheater, Judith's father, and had once flirted with Joyce, before she was Mrs Wheater and Judith's mother. Neither of the Wheater parents is with the little party, however. It is young Judith, aided by various staff, who is in charge of transporting the whole tribe to Venice. Terry has a twin sister. Then's there a baby. And there are three "steps". These latter are the progeny of the various other marriages that from time to time have interrupted the union of Cliffe and Joyce (who are now back together, although we don't know for how long).

He doesn't see it until very late in the piece, but readers (and Rose Sellars, when she finally meets him again) clearly see how Boyne is increasingly obsessed with Judith.

He doesn't do anything irretrievably gross, so he continues to retain some of our sympathy (although more and more that warm feeling is attenuated by our consciousness of his utter stupidity). But Boyne remains largely blind to the element motivating his actions throughout the book (which turn out to be highly self-destructive). Which is a sobering thought...


Venice, 2023

He rationalizes his involvement with the children through his desire to help. And it's not that he thrusts himself upon them. Before they're even off the boat, Terry asks him to persuade the Wheaters to let him have a tutor (all the children are essentially uneducated). This Boyne accomplishes (partly because Mrs Wheater has her own reasons for employing an interesting young tutor). Then Judith goes all out to continue to engage his sympathy, explaining that -- because there is a danger that the parents' ever-changing marital arrangments might scatter the children to the four winds again -- they have sworn an oath that they will stay together. She tries to persuade Boyne to stay longer in Venice, mentioning that the Wheaters can't decide where to head next, "and it's always when they've got nothing particular to do that they quarrel".

We can't, to be honest, quite understand what captivates him about Judith. We hope it's not the sight of her playing mother to the brood she has taken charge of. What, then? He can't quite decide if she's "pretty". And although she's a complete dunce, she's disconcertingly worldly-wise. At one point, she rounds on Boyne: "My age? My age? What do you know about my age? I'm as old as your grandmother. I'm as old as the hills." And she's super-manipulative. How conscious she is of that I'll come back to in a minute.

Boyne eventually leaves, goes to the Dolomites, and works on his relationship with Rose. Which develops quite nicely. They agree they will marry, although Rose doesn't want to do anything too quickly.

But then Judith writes to Boyne, asking him to persuade the Wheaters to move the children away from the city, as it's proving to be bad for Terry's fragile health. Boyne proposes popping back down to the coast to see what he can do. Rose is -- understandably -- very suspicious of this idea, but before he can set off, they're ambushed by the arrival of Judith and the whole tribe in the Dolomite village. Spooked by another crisis between the senior Wheaters, and parental discussions of where (separately) to accommodate the children, they've run away, bringing the governess and the nanny with them. So now Boyne is well and truly involved again.

He returns to Venice to sort things out. All the pieces keep shifting around him, as the players constantly eye up new partners. But a temporary agreement is reached for the children to stay where they are, with Boyne as informal guardian.



Rose, as I said, is clear-eyed about what is going on here. She's an intelligent, cultured, tactful, and energetic woman, and she keeps hinting to Boyne that he's deceiving himself: "You always speak of her as such a child... [She's] awfully young; but still -- grown up," she says on one occasion. Later she points out: "Judith's a young lady who is eminently capable of fighting her own battles." And again: "Seven children -- and one of them already grown up!" Deaf ears...

Boyne brings back from Venice an interesting and distinctive present for Judith -- and a rather run-of-the-mill engagement ring for Rose. When the two women next meet, "Mrs Sellars's eye instantly lit on the crystal pendant, Judith's on the sapphire ring. The mutual reconnaissance was swift and silent as the crossing of searchlights in a night sky."

Judith is also not above using a bit of power-play on Rose, answering her comment that Judith is very young for all this responsibility with an apparently insouciant bit of rudeness: "I suppose I ought to be flattered... I know that at your age and mother's it's thought awfully flattering to be called young. But, you see, I'm not sixteen yet, so it's nothing extraordinary to me." On another occasion, she says to Rose: "One does get used to children. I suppose you've never had any, have you?" When Rose agrees she hasn't, "Judith continued encouragingly, 'I daresay it's not too late.'"

The evidence mounts, but still Boyne remains blind to what he's feeling. We have the picnic where Boyne catches Mr Dobree (Rose's lawyer, newly arrived from the US) looking at the sleeping Judith in a less than appropriate way. Boyne becomes aware "that he also, once or twice, had been vaguely afraid of himself when he had looked too long at Judith... He disliked Dobree the more for serving as his mirror." Yet, when Rose tells Boyne that Dobree "was convinced that you were in love with Judith Wheater", he's all denial. So much so that Rose faces her fears: "Martin... but you ARE in love with her!... I believe I've always known it."

She is called to Paris, and asks him to come too. He says he can't leave the children. "I'm pledged," he says, "I can't get round it." To which she replies, "You can't get round it because you don't want to. You're pledged because you want to be. You want to be because Mr Dobree was right... You may think you are [telling the truth]. But the truth is something very different -- something you're not conscious of yourself, perhaps... not clearly... You're in love with Judith Wheater, and you're trying to persuade yourself that you're still in love with me."

She returns his ring by post. This is not quite the end of the relationship, but the writing is on the wall.



One by one, Boyne's strategems for keeping the children together crash and burn. He goes out through the pouring rain to explain the defeat to Judith (who has been summoned to Paris to meet her mother, plus the new person she wants to marry). There's an excruciating scene where -- twice -- Boyne seems on the point of proposing to Judith. The first time, he's checked by a misunderstanding: "Oh, Martin, do you really mean you're going to adopt us all, and we're all going to stay with you forever?"

The second time, having established that she's not 16 for another five months, he mentions the prospect of her getting married, hypothesizes a proposal from "a fellow", and suggests, with a self-deprecating laugh, that it might be from him. She joins in his laugh: "'Well, that would be funny!' she said. There was a bottomless silence... He felt her little disconsolate figure standing alone behind him in the rain, and hurried away as if to put himself out of its reach forever."

No-one does these agonizing encounters quite as well as Wharton, I think...

Boyne accompanies Judith to Paris to meet her mother: "He had caught a glimpse of a joy he would never reach, and he knew that his eyes would always dazzle with it; but the obligation of giving Judith the help she needed kept his pain in that deep part of the soul where the great renunciations lie."

It turns out Joyce Wheater's new man is Mr Dobree, and he can swing it so that all her children (maybe even the "steps") remain with her. Boyne sees that Judith has started to put her faith in Dobree: "Whoever would promise to keep the children together would gain a momentary hold over her -- as he once had, alas!"

He arranges to take on a new work contract, and sails off.

Returning to Europe three years later, he coincidentally finds himself in the same place as Judith, but doesn't approach her. "Two days afterward, the ship which had brought him to Europe started on her voyage back to Brazil. On her deck stood Boyne, a lonely man."



It's Judith who takes up most of the story. But the next most interesting child-character is her younger brother, Terry, aged 11. When we first meet him, he's described like this: "He did not look English, he looked cosmopolitan: as if he had been sharpened and worn down by contact with too many different civilizations -- or perhaps merely with too many different hotels."

And there's our second theme: the plight of "hotel children".

They're constantly on the move, these kiddies. Terry complains that they're "everlastingly going away", and muses that that's the inevitable lot of children, "with all the different parents they're divided up among, and all the parents living in different places, and fighting so about when the children are to go to which, and the lawyers always changing things just as you think they're arranged". Many of these children refer to their parents by their surnames: "The habit of doing so, Miss Scope had explained, rose from the fact that, in the case of most of the playmates of their wandering life, the names 'father' and 'mother' had to be applied, successively or simultaneously, to so many different persons." On the one hand, such children don't know anything about the places they pass through (Judith: "Mother and father never even have a guide-book; they just ask the hall-porter where to go. And then something always seems to prevent their going"); on the other hand, they know enough to be world-weary (Doll, one of the hotel children in the Wheaters' circle, committed suicide the previous year).

Overall, Wharton takes a real swipe at the fast set in this book, in accents now larded with satire, now shot through with pathos. Towards the beginning, when Boyne explains he has been living in the "wilderness", Miss Scope, the children's governess, replies: "The real wilderness is the world WE live in; packing up our tents every few weeks for another move... And the marriages just like tents -- folded up and thrown away when you've done with them."

Often we see a stark role reversal. Miss Scope says of Judith, for example, that she has "never been a child -- there was no time". Mrs Wheater unwittingly concurs, telling Boyne: "You don't have to tell the modern child things! They seem to be born knowing them... Why, Judy's like a mother to me, I assure you." A sense of responsibility has been dripped into Judith with her mother's milk (or, more likely, her infant formula). At one point, she remarks: "If children don't look after each other, who's going to do it for them? You can't expect parents to, when they don't know how to look after themselves." This is all borne out in a farcical scene in Venice when Boyne wants to discuss the children's futures, and finds it hard to even get their parents' attention, because they're constantly distracted by entertainments.

Wharton paints a picture of a remarkably shallow set of people, who would be pitiable were they not so annoying. They live life as though they're in a film, says Boyne, swept along by the clamour around them, never resisting. For all their wealth, they're remarkably conformist; it's unfashionable to be different. And they're utterly self-absorbed. There's a wonderful exchange during the Venice set-piece, when Cliffe, concerned that time has gone by, and he's missing something, exclaims: "Damn it all -- I'd no idea it was so late...", to which Mrs Lullmer (mother of the unfortunate suicide) replies: "It's always late in this place. I don't see how we any of us stand it... I always say we're the real labouring classes."

While most of this fraternity don't worry about education (here's Doll's mother again: "Pixie's little friends are all in what I believe you call the 'smart set'. I confess I think that even more important for a child than learning that Morocco is not in South Africa"), some become obsessed by the latest trends (the latest Princess Buondelmonte, for example, stepmother to a couple of the Wheater tribe, challenges Boyne: "Can you give me... any sort of assurance that Astorre and Beatrice have ever been properly psychoanalyzed, and that their studies and games have been selected with a view to their particular moral, alimentary, dental and glandular heredity?"



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All in all, there's lots to like here. It's sharply observed. It's a wonderful study of a dilemma, leaving us with lots of unanswered questions with regard to Boyne's motivations. Even though the satire is biting (sometimes outrageously so), it's still a social comedy, amusing and easy to read.

But it's also an irritating book... The children are irritating. Apart from Judith and Terry, they're essentially caricatures, variously naughty, unrestrained, or avaricious.

The manipulative Judith is majorly irritating. I wondered for a while whether she actually knew exactly what she was doing with Boyne. But that key conversation (the one with the almost-proposal) suggests not. She's not leading him on in a sexual fashion, but her all-round determination -- to get her way, to be centre-stage, to eliminate all rivals -- is utterly selfish, exploitative, and deliberate. In that sense, she does know exactly what she's doing, and she's totally prepared to sacrifice her victim. And you want to kick Boyne for falling for it. So he gets irritating too.

The Wheaters and their set, it goes without saying, are infuriating.

So, by the end, the only ones I wasn't annoyed by were Rose and Terry...

But you forgive all that, because the central problematique is so intriguing. Wharton cited the novel as one of her favourite works, and I think it's easy to see why.