Backlist Book #02: The Mother's Recompense by Edith Wharton

Soap operas, society doyennes, and me

I GREW UP on soap operas—specifically, The Young and the Restless and its half-hour sister show The Bold and the Beautiful. My mother used to record them so she could watch them when she got home from work, which meant I got to watch them too in all their over-the-top glory. For better or for worse, antihero Victor Newman’s shenanigans and the thirty-year-plus love triangle between Ridge, Brooke, and Taylor, among other melodramatic storylines, deeply informed my narrative tastes. In spite of getting a degree in literature, working in avant-garde literary spaces, and being generally obsessed with language, my favorite thing in the world is still a well-told story dripping with juicy, high-drama characters and plot that makes me keep turning the page.¹

As you might imagine, it’s hard to find literary writing that has both narrative wings and lapidary prose.² As Naomi Kanakia writes so succinctly in “How to write a book that ‘transcends’ commercial fiction,” much of literary fiction is aggressively hostile to the reader’s enjoyment. When I come across writing that does both, I feel like I’ve hit the jackpot—especially when I find it in a century-old book.

Enter Edith Wharton. Yes, that Edith Wharton! If you’ve never read her work, the consensus is that you should begin with The Age of Innocence, and I generally agree. It’s her best work in my opinion, smart, suspenseful, and sophisticated.

But if what you really want is a juicy, soapy story, might I tempt you with The Mother’s Recompense (D. Appleton, 1925, 288 pp.)?

The Mother’s Recompense (D. Appleton, 1925, 288 pp.)

Picture this: A mother returns to New York City’s high society at the end of WWI after years away in Europe, seeking to reconnect with her daughter, who is now engaged to a handsome young war hero. But! It turns out that her daughter’s fiancé is none other than the mother’s former lover. The mother must grapple with her instinct to protect her daughter as well as own unresolved feelings for the man. Scandalous, right?

What sets Wharton’s soapiest books³ apart from books with similarly sensational plots is her language, especially when she turns her gimlet eye toward social structures and the way they constrict and shape the most intimate human relationships. Consider this description that would make any mother of a teenage daughter⁴ flinch upon reading:

Kate Clephane’s first thought was: “I mustn't let her see how it hurts—” not because of the fear of increasing her daughter's suffering, but to prevent her finding out how she could inflict more pain. Anne, at that moment, looked as if the discovery would have been exquisite to her.

Or Kate’s observation of the sea of faces at another society party:

Again the sameness of the American Face encompassed her with its innocent uniformity. How many of them it seemed to take to make up a single individuality! Most of them were like the miles and miles between two railway stations. She saw again, with gathering wonder, that one may be young and handsome and healthy and eager, and yet unable, out of such rich elements, to evolve a personality.

Wharton’s prose is loaded with gems like these, faceted and sharp and surprisingly au courant, that cut straight to the bone and are worth the price of admission alone. I would read her books for her voice even if the entire plot revolved around watching paint dry.

Luckily, that’s not necessary. Sometimes you want a book that flings you through its pages, and sometimes you want to revel in the glory of language. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get both.

1. See also Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz.

2. Never fear, I do read genre too! I’m a bit picky about what I’ll read (see again the obsession with language), but I do have some excellent backlist books in various genres to recommend in the future.

3. Twilight Sleep is another favorite—it’s more satirical but just as juicy.

4. Me. I mean me.