It has everything in there: thwarted ambition, terrible longing, actions that can’t be undone, the kind of claustrophobia that can be exerted by a single person or held in an entire community. In fact, there is a glorious melancholy to its scant 100 or so pages. If all of this sounds a little heavy-going, it is saved by the lightness and acuity of Wharton’s writing. The fact that this cannot end well is clear long before the overly portentous breaking of a red glass pickle dish at dinner. Worn down by Zeena’s bitterness and hypochondria, Frome falls in love with the beautiful, sprightly Mattie – her own sentiments equally unspoken and equally reciprocated. They in turn enlist the help of Zeena’s cousin Mattie Silver who has no parents, no money, and nowhere else to go. He marries his cousin Zeena out of a sense of duty after she comes to care for the latter and eventually falls sick herself. As a young man, Frome’s educational aspirations are curtailed first by an injured father and then a sick mother. Bookended by the present, the bulk of the narrative relays Frome’s early life, which has been progressively whittled down and gated in. As such stories so often are, it is therefore largely about yearning for what you cannot have. Instead, he must bed down for the night at Frome’s house and encounter its unhappy history up close.Īt its heart, Ethan Frome is a story about being trapped by circumstance. One day, when the snow is heaped in white waves, a storm prevents this unnamed narrator from getting home. He seeks the story of Frome’s sorry circumstances in fragments from others but doesn’t get the full explanation until he enlists Frome’s services in driving him to and from the train station. He is immediately intrigued by Ethan Frome: a taciturn “ruin of a man” with lopsided shoulders and a scarred gash on his forehead who was involved in some sort of “smash-up” two decades previously. A stranger comes to town, working on a job connected to a nearby powerhouse that generates electricity.

The story is told like Wuthering Heights in miniature, minus its ghosts and children. Its “torrents of light and air” by day and “silver-edged darkness” by night cast a penetrating spotlight over the area, rendering the actions of its inhabitants as crystalline as the flakes that continually coat the ground. It shapes moods, hastens life-altering decisions, and provides the perfect stage for a tragedy that couldn’t happen at any other time of the year. In the remote New England village of Starkfield, winter’s beautiful torpor rules everything. Mostly, though, it’s because of the seasonal setting.

Ethan frome book