The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton is one of my favorite classic authors, so naturally, I try to squish her work into my reading challenges whenever I can. I have her on my Classics Club list four times and I've used her a few times in my Back to the Classics lists as well. The Glimpses of the Moon is one of her novels that I'm using for both challenges this year. It's one of her less famous works, so I knew nothing about it before I started reading. I was curious to see what it was all about though, so I dove right in hoping to find another favorite.

The story is set in the 1920s and centers around Susy Branch and Nick Lansing. Both Susy and Nick run in wealthy circles and fill their days with fashion, art, parties, and lavish vacations. Unfortunately for the pair of them, they do not come from rich families and have no real money of their own. They get by on the kindness of their friends, making themselves such agreeable companions that others in their circle foot all of their bills. This is a precarious situation to be in, however, and their best chance at maintaining the glamorous lifestyle to which they have become accustomed is to marry well. Unfortunately for them, however, Susy and Nick fall in love with each other.

In order to enjoy each other's company for a long as possible, Susy comes up with an unconventional plan. They will marry each other, live for as long as possible off of the checks and favors they receive as wedding gifts, and then divorce once their money runs out or if either of them finds a wealthier spouse prospect. Divorces are easy to obtain and are now socially acceptable within their set, so this plan would not harm their reputations. Nick agrees to give it a shot and the pair are soon married and enjoying a free honeymoon in a friend's Italian villa on Lake Como.

The experiment starts off blissfully for the newlyweds, but things take a turn when one of their wealthy friends asks Susy for a shady favor in recompense for the use of her vacation home. She asks her to post some letters to help her cover up an affair. Susy, feeling trapped into going along with it, does the favor. She feels badly about it though, as this crosses a line for her, and she tries to hide her actions from Nick. Eventually he finds out, and is very upset. He totally disapproves of Susy's participation in the scheme and proposes ending their marriage then and there, believing their whole plan to be a failure if it causes them to lose their morals. Susy is mad at herself for posting the letters, but also believes Nick's reaction to be naive. Of course people will ask for favors in exchange for allowing them to use their property for free - how could he expect otherwise? She thinks he should know that sponging off people is a delicate dance requiring give and take.

This disagreement causes Nick to head off on his own to do some soul searching, and the pair must decide how, or if, they want to go on with their arrangement in the aftermath. Both travel around Europe, meet other people, and entertain the idea of finally divorcing and attaching themselves to better matches. They have ample time to think about the nature of money, relationships, and marriage, and consider if they want to continue attaching themselves to wealthy friends or discard that lifestyle and start earning their own cash. Ultimately, both must figure out a plan for their futures, and determine if that future is one in which they can be together.

I realize that reading my plot description makes The Glimpses of the Moon sounds like a shallow story about selfish people, but I thought this novel was excellent. The story was original and dramatic and truly engaging. Watching Susy and Nick attempt to navigate the world of the upper class with no money of their own was morally gray enough to be interesting, and I found myself constantly wondering how far I would go to keep my position among my friends if I were in their place. Despite the self-seeking nature of their marriage agreement, Susy and Nick do actually love each other--really love each other--and they both have personal standards as well. The strength of their feelings raises the stakes of the story and adds a layer of complexity that I appreciated.

As is usual in her fiction, Wharton does a good job examining the couple's problems along gender lines. Nick's personal standards are the more rigid of the pair. He is consistently uncomfortable with how Susy manages their affairs and treats her quite harshly when he learns about how she helped her friend cover up her affair. However, he doesn't seem to realize that as a man, it is much easier for him to walk away from this situation based on his morals. He can earn money from his travel writing, or find a respectable, if low paying, job working in a place like a bank. As a woman, Susy needs more money to maintain a fancy lifestyle when rapidly changing fashions are taken into account, and her options for earning money are much more limited and much lower paying than a man's would be. Susy is willing to do more than Nick is to maintain their lifestyle not necessarily because she is more selfish, but because she has more to lose than he does if she loses her position among her rich circle of friends. Nick's moralizing, while correct in an ethical sense, consistently irked me because he couldn't seem to understand Susy's position.

Both Nick and Susy grow and change across the novel as they grapple with their feelings and their plans for the future. Their development is well-written and the cast of secondary characters in the story provide interesting comparisons and contrasts to their situation. We see examples of the unabashedly selfish and the morally upright among their friends. We see frivolous divorces and strong marriages. We see those with money and those without. The examples of the people around them help both Nick and Susy think through their difficulties and develop their new philosophies. This story is finely crafted, and Wharton's exploration of the interactions between love and money felt real. I could understand why the different characters throughout the story felt the way they did. Even the ones that were annoying and unforgivably greedy were understandable.

The Glimpses of the Moon was a very good read, and I was surprised at how much I liked it. It wasn't quite perfect, of course. There were some issues with pacing towards the end and a bit too much hand-wringing over whether or not to salvage Nick and Susy's marriage overall. I'm not sure if the ending was quite right. In spite of those issues, however, this was still an excellent reading experience and one of my new favorite Wharton novels. It was not quite as compelling as what she created in The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence, but I still thoroughly enjoyed this one and am happy to have picked it up.


Challenge Tally
Back to the Classics 2020 (A Classic with Nature in the Title): 8/12
Classics Club (#39 on my list): 73/100 

Total Books Read in 2020: 39