Book review: Glimpses of the Moon

Opening the recent re-release of Edith Warton’s 1922 novel, Glimpses of the Moon, is to disconcertingly enter a different world – at least for a moment. A Swiss lake. A balustrade. Midnight with nightingales. A young honeymooning couple.

The style is eerily reminiscent of an electric-blue and gold Maxfield Parrish illustration from a glossy magazine of the same period: all balconies and stephanotis, azure twilights, and vanishing stars.

Then two pages in, it suddenly strikes the reader that this is a very relevant and contemporary story indeed. It is Married at First Sight or another reality TV show – 1920s style. The sets are luxurious, the world exotic, but the passions and plot are just the same.

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Nick Lansing and Suzy Branch are young, attractive New Yorkers, without money. They both have very wealthy friends and acquaintances and the world they see is far from the one they can afford. They stay in grand homes when they have been invited and travel when their costs have been covered.

To complicate matters, they may have fallen in love.

Nick and Suzy decide to marry, but with one qualification. Given their backgrounds and desires, they realise their chance of happiness with each other is relatively remote. They have no real status and nothing in the bank.

They enter a bargain that sets everything in motion. Invitations to honeymoon at a succession of lavish homes, everywhere from Lake Como in Switzerland to a palace in Venice, have already been offered. Why not enjoy them and each other until either of them meets a financially more eligible partner?

They foresee a year at the most.

The decision might be cynical but Wharton sets in play a story that twists emotions and reveals unexpected consequences. Passions deepen and become jealous. Nick and Suzy must confront their situation and discover just who they really are…

Wharton was an American writer, play-wright, and designer. She was born into a prestigious and wealthy family – ‘keeping up with the Jones’ was a reference to Wharton’s parents. Eventually she would cross the Atlantic more than sixty times in luxury liners. Her houses in Newport and Massachusetts were famous homes of the time. Then, when her marriage disintegrated, she moved to Paris permanently.

Her novels include the award-winning The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth. Her depictions of Old New York are essential reading. Glimpses of the Moon, however, is a different thing.

While the novel lacks the subtlety of a first-rate Wharton, it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a thoughtful entertainment. It is an enjoyable romp through a world of privilege with scenery to die for. It was immediately made into a movie on its first publication, and it would easily serve as the basis for another.

* Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton (Pushkin Press, $25)