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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/black-lives-matter-small-towns/"></div>I’ve lived in a small town — South Pasadena, CA — for over 25 years. Many consider it an idyllic liberal community. Fewer than 10 miles from Downtown Los Angeles, South Pasadena is a popular television and film location for All American Town, USA, the oldest builder of floats in the historic Tournament of Roses Parade, and the nation’s first AGZA green zone. As a white woman, I’d felt safe and protected in this bubble — and only when I allied myself to black activists in a visible way did I start to see another side to this city.
On July 8, I was protesting in support of Black Lives Matter in the company of a fellow protester and organizer, Fahren James, who is Black. A man with an extensive criminal record named Joe Richcreek, bearing a rock and a sharpened drumstick, spat in my face as I filmed his hostile behavior on my phone. The spit also hit Fahren.
The South Pasadena Police reluctantly filed a report, and only after Fahren insisted. Two nights later, he threw a rock at Fahren, calling her a “fucking bitch.” Without help from the police, she tracked Richcreek down and he was finally arrested, though not for the spitting assault — only for throwing a rock at Fahren — and he was released soon after. The police reports for these two assaults are full of inaccuracies and biases, especially against Fahren, making her — the victim — sound like the suspect.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (NY-14) recent response-speech to Rep. Ted Yoho’s (FL-03) calling her a “fucking bitch,” delivered on the House floor, applies to Fahren; Richcreek hurled these same words at her. They seem popular lately.
“It is a culture of lack of impunity,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “of accepting violence and violent language against women, an entire structure that supports that.”
Richcreek’s violence toward Fahren was certainly not limited to his words.  He came back for the third time the afternoon of July the 19, riding his bicycle to the corner of the BLM protest with a pipe lodged under his arm, and he threatened a BLM protester. When the police arrived, they had to be briefed by five members of the community on the two prior incidents of hate crimes, never mind that they occurred a block from their police station and City Hall.
Where would Richcreek be if his skin were darker?
He clearly has problems, but he’s free to harass people, and the fact that he isn’t suffering consequences for his lifetime of antisocial behavior speaks to the exact white privilege that the BLM protests address.
Performative politics abound in South Pasadena, where nails were found in the driveways and on the porches of million-dollar BLM-supporting homes, and councilperson Michael Cacciotti and Mayor Bob Joe made a point to visit these victims; yet no one has reached out to Fahren or to her brother, London Lang, who started the ongoing BLM protest over 50 days ago.
They also abounded in the virtual community forum where Fahren and I relayed our experiences in a Zoom storytelling setting — private, no recording allowed — organized by the city council’s new Future of Policing in South Pasadena Subcommittee, formed in response to the popularity of BLM. The chief of police, councilmembers, and about 70 other community members listened. Once again, they did not reach out to us afterward.
They abounded still in the proposed hate crime resolution proposed five days after Richcreek was arrested, though the attacks were never mentioned in the City Council meeting. Councilmember Marina Khubesrian has been holding court with the South Pasadena Youth 4 Police Reform and the Anti-Racist Committee, and her solution is to create a mural, while disregarding the attacks and the SPPD’s negligible response.
All of these events have happened against the backdrop of South Pasadena business owners who have taken a different stance entirely. One posted on her Facebook that she doesn’t support BLM because it’s a hate group. Another commented on my Instagram: Please don’t bring the wrong attention to South Pasadena&#8230; We don’t need looting here! Or the business owner whose grammatically Trumpian council meeting public comment against the local BLM protest reads, in part: Are we willing to put our residences at risk by defunding the police department. All Lives Matter. Stop the racism by having to distinguish what color your skin is to be an American. We are all Americans. 
I’m frustrated by the so-called progressive council people who sit on the dais and proclaim “All Black Lives Matter,” yet they have failed to recognize or acknowledge the Black lives that were attacked at our crossroads, and continue to be threatened.
What happened to Fahren and me is not unusual. It is happening to people, and mostly women, all over the country who have the courage to stand up to the status quo. White allyship is not always comfortable. It’s a journey on a road that isn’t straight or smooth. It requires acknowledgment of a historically racist framework.
The BLM movement is relevant to all enclaves — and especially to those who like to fly under the radar. The universality of the importance of this movement is significant in small towns like ours — towns that have enjoyed the luxury of saying “This doesn’t happen here.”
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Black Lives Matter in Small Towns, Too

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/smash-edith-whartons-ethan-frome/"></div>Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is a tragedy, almost unendurably poignant, about a thwarted double suicide, which ensures purgatory-like suffering for its participants. I first read the short novel as a junior in high school, and it scared me. It’s a grim New England horror show — puritanism, repression, and stoic endurance — more ghastly than that other high school English favorite, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
What stayed with me since high school was the fateful sled ride in the anesthetic snowy landscape, a sneaky metaphor for dangerous, thrilling sex, alluded to in the beginning of the novel as the “smash-up.” The sled ride was foreshadowed throughout the story before its climactic (pun intended) reveal. (As a notable aside, according to Urban Dictionary, “smash” is now slang, meaning: “to f&#8211;ck someone really good.”)
A male engineer travels to the Dickensian-named Starkfield, recognizing in the limping Frome the “ruin of a man,” and unfolds the “smash-up” tale through his interactions with Frome via commentaries and stories.  As these tales are told, Wharton deftly demonstrates how culture and circumstances trap people.
What little we know or understand about Zenobia Frome and her young cousin, Mattie Silver, who revolve around Ethan, is vague, as the final stinging, ironic commentary from Mrs. Hale validates: “… I don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard: ‘cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.” It’s not like the women who are alive — Zeena and Mattie especially — get to be gregarious truth-tellers, either.
Zeena’s an income-sucking, hypochondriac killjoy, seven years older than her husband’s 28 years, though “she was already an old woman.” Ethan probably married her out of guilt: after all, she’d taken care of his dying mom. Zeena has “asthmatic breathing,” she wraps her hair in “yellow flannel,” and she keeps  her false teeth in a cup on the bedside table. Later, she’s reading a book (Ethan paid extra postage for its delivery) called Kidney Troubles and Their Cure.
Mattie sells her piano for 50 bucks to travel to Starkfield, so she can become Zeena’s caretaker, since there are no other viable options, now that her parents have died and left her destitute. What she lacks in domesticity skills, she makes up for by being Zeena’s opposite.
Ethan falls for Mattie almost instantaneously, and she him, their connection providing flickers of joy in an otherwise joyless existence, love the sole respite. Frome’s excitement comes in no small part from the magic of intimacy, how “he could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will.” He’s a caretaker, duty-bound: his parents, the farm, his ghoulish wife. He’d loved college, but: “His father’s death, and the misfortunes surrounding it, had put a premature end to Ethan’s studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.”
Marital duty is also a hard foe, personified by Zeena’s cat, Puss, who gets between Ethan and Mattie while Zeena’s away, as if her stand-in, sitting in her place at the dinner table, and finally, inevitably, breaking an irreplaceable pickle dish, a wedding gift, no less. I love that Wharton chose the unglamorous pickle dish, and that it echoes an earlier scene, where Zeena hands Mattie an empty medicine bottle, having sucked out its last dregs, stating, “‘If you can get the taste out it’ll do for pickles.’” (In the margin, I wrote: YUCK.)
I can’t help but wonder if Zeena, who is at times comically abhorrent, represents Wharton’s disgust for her own husband. It’s possible to imagine the misery of Wharton’s marriage, alongside the short-lived, but blissed-out affair she’d had with the caddish, bisexual American journalist, Morton Fullerton, whom she’d met in 1907. In many ways, Wharton was a traditionalist, who believed strongly in marital fidelity, and she wrote the novel at the heels of her short-lived relationship with Fullerton. Like Ethan and his women, she was suffering, trapped, and her situation must’ve felt impossible. By the time the novel was published in 1911, she and Fullerton had been broken up for three years. A few years later, after a 28-year slog, she finally divorced her husband. That fleeting, charged triangulation — one relationship duty-bound and relentlessly awful, the other passionate but emotionally treacherous — no doubt played into her telling of Ethan Frome. Fullerton was charismatic, menacing, and he came with all sorts of baggage: during his relationship with Wharton, his former mistress was blackmailing him over love letters sent to him by his friend, Lord Gower.
Wharton also claimed to have written the original version of the story in French as an exercise, and to have “talked the tale over page by page” with the lawyer and diplomat Walter Berry who was her lifelong friend and another unrequited love, though her relationship with Berry was more weighted and complicated. Berry, Wharton stated, “exacted a higher standard in economy of expression, in purity of language, in the avoidance of the hackneyed and precious.” The language and the theme of Ethan Frome needed to be treated “starkly and summarily.”
Fullerton was dangerous, and he didn’t reciprocate Wharton’s love, but he awakened her sexuality and uninhibited passions can be frightening. Ethan and Mattie’s fatefully doomed sled ride resembles passionate, reckless sex — the kind they had denied themselves previously. “Her breath in his neck sent him shuddering,” and he “leaned back and drew her mouth to his…” Then “her blood seemed to be in his veins.” But Zeena’s face flashes, “with twisted monstrous lineaments,” causing Ethan to flinch, the sled swerving. He rights it, driving down on the “black projecting mass. There was a last instant when the air shot past him like millions of fiery wires…”
It’s not until later that the startling revelation came: had Ethan not insisted on sitting in the front of the sled, most likely to take the brunt of the collision, duty-bound yet again, convincing Mattie by saying he wants to “‘feel you holding me,’” he might have been able to navigate more accurately, thus achieving their original intention, death being the luckier outcome — an escape from reality’s sharp trap.
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Smash-up: Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome

Smash-up: Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/edith-whartons-custom-country-undine-spragg-female-donald-trump/"></div>Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, published in 1913, seems coolly prescient of a corrupted and corrupting Trumpian worldview, where money is the standard by which all other virtues and values are judged. Wharton’s anti-heroine Undine Spragg springs from this soil — ruthless, repugnant, and vacuous — a fictional female equivalent of Donald Trump.
The novel is Wharton’s most satirical, and her prose is scathing. Consider Wharton’s description of Undine’s suitor, Peter Van Degen, who has a “grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as earlobes,” and “the face of a covetous bullying boy, with a large appetite for primitive satisfactions and a sturdy belief in his intrinsic right to them.”
Ambitious and greedy, Undine Spragg — note her initials: U.S. — comes from the fictional city of Apex, which is somewhere in the Midwest, but unimportant now that Undine’s mounting New York’s social ladder, two, three, four rungs at a time. The selfsame vicious climate that brought Lily Bart’s downfall in The House of Mirth, due to her conflicting ingrained integrity, proves fortuitous for Undine, who has no morals.
Along with Undine’s forthcoming first husband, who will go on to commit suicide after Undine leaves him, the reader finds out that Undine is not named after the legendary water nymph, which gains a soul by marrying a handsome knight, only to reach a tragic end. She’s named after a patent hair-curler that made her father money. He put it on the market the same week she was born. “It’s from undoolay,” Mrs. Spragg explains, “you know, the French for crimping…”
A liar and a cheat, Undine is incurious, unintelligent, and recklessly extravagant. She loves gauche glittery displays of wealth, like a crow enraptured by shiny objects, accumulating them, wanting more; and her greatest passion is her ego, which craves constant amusement.
In a society that revolves around money, that makes women ornaments and enemies of one another, and that dehumanizes people, Undine is “a monstrously perfect result…the completest proof of its triumph.” Her various glitzy digs, like the “monumental threshold” and “marble vestibule” of the extravagant Hotel Stentorian, where she takes a “mirror-lined lift” to her private room, echo Trump Tower’s mirror-door elevators and escalator-ride presidency declarations, along with a Mar-a-Lago brassy otherworldliness. Undine worships her reflection, and she’s constantly seeking it in her garish surroundings, living like the “fashionable people” in “lofty hotels” such as the Olympian, the Incandescent, the Ormolu, and the Nouveau Luxe. (The names in this novel alone! There’s an American heiress named Miss Looty Arlington!)
“Where does the real life of most American men lie?” the character Charles Bowen asks, midway through the novel. The answer, he says (and one can imagine Trump might say), is business, and men pay off women with “money and motors and clothes” as the “big bribe” to stay out of men’s true passion. But Undine is a stellar (and heartless) businesswoman, exploiting her beauty, becoming the perfect object, her “chameleon-like nature” providing whatever is desired: she is the product. Undine has a revolving door of husbands, and when they become less advantageous, or resistant to her aims, she discards them. She views others only in terms of their usefulness to her. All her relationships are transactional, including with her son: for the right amount of money, she’ll even trade custody of him.
If you’re not already dwelling on Undine’s similarity to Trump, consider her unwarranted confidence and inflexible determination to have whatever she wants, no matter the cost. Although she often achieves her desires, she only wants more. “Even now,” Undine realizes, in one of my favorite passages, “she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.”
The same year that The Custom of the Country was published, Wharton finally divorced her husband. She’d endured his alcoholism, mental illness, and affairs for 28 years. By the time of the publication, she’d also experienced a surprising and sexually satisfying love affair with Morton Fullerton. But they’d broken up: though skilled at lovemaking, Fullerton failed at the more staid and responsible features of a mature relationship. One can imagine Wharton’s thrill at Undine’s agency, powering through men, cold-hearted and thriving.
Yet despite Undine’s efforts and accomplishments, crassness clings to her. Elmer Moffatt, her last husband, is the most like her — they’re practically doubles —and she’s able to whiff out his lesser traits, understanding that her husband’s “loudness and redness, his misplaced joviality, his familiarity with the servants, his alternating swagger and ceremony with her friends” are revolting. She needs his money but not him. Moffatt’s wealth provides her with endless amusement and distraction, but it can’t give her respectability. No amount of money can do so. She realizes that her extravagance can’t buy her society’s respect. In fact, Undine is chagrined to discover that her peppered history precludes her from becoming an ambassadress. If only Trump&#8217;s dissolute past had precluded his presidency. Though Trump’s story forks in a different direction he, like Undine, is left eternally unsatisfied.
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Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country: Undine Spragg is the Female Donald Trump

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country: Undine Spragg is the Female Donald Trump

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/edith-whartons-characters-products-environment/"></div>Initially serialized in four parts in the magazine Pictorial Review, The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s 12th novel, and she wrote it when she was in her 50s, having already established a literary reputation. Almost universally acclaimed, The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. The novel is still widely recognized, and it remains one of her most beloved works. Her first published book was not a novel but an influential treatise and manual for house decoration, The Decoration of Houses, written in collaboration with the architect Ogden Conman Jr., and published in 1897, forecasting her comprehensive skills at detailing place and setting in her later fictions.
Old New York society’s deep-seated, insular, rigid clans of first families, typically of Dutch and English ancestry and dating back to Revolutionary America, provide the fertile soil for most of Edith Wharton’s oeuvre. The Age of Innocence has a more subtle vision than its predecessors, The House of Mirth, and the acerbic, undervalued The Custom of the Country, though Age of Innocence retains her signature irony, as it is “the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience.” Wharton, who grew up entrenched in this stultifying environment, wrote The Age of Innocence in the wake of World War I, at a wistful removal from the novel’s 1870s setting, and from the distance of France, which she’d long since made her home. The novel moves beyond her customary anthropological-like satire, and also becoming a surprising paean — infused with longing and melancholy — for what she considered the disappearing, jeopardized values and culture of this selfsame society. “In my youth,” she wrote in her memoir A Backward Glance, “the Americans of the original States, who in moments of crisis still shaped the national point of view, were the heirs of an old tradition of European culture, which the country has now totally rejected […] The compact world of my youth has receded into a past from which it can only be dug up in bits by the assiduous relic-hunters; and its smallest fragments begin to be worth collecting and putting together before the last of those who know the live structure are swept away with it.”
Wharton as “relic-hunter” clashes the positive values of her birth family’s social group with their narrow, unimaginative, cutthroat disregard toward anyone different, or anyone who threatens traditions. New York City, Newport, Rhode Island (where Wharton’s family had a summer house), and, in its final pages, Wharton’s adopted home of Paris, serve as her charged, specific landscape. Now a Starbucks, Wharton’s birthplace and childhood home, 14 West 23rd Street, is also the birthplace of her imagined Gilded Age New York.
Within the Mingotts, the Mansons, the Van der Luydens — who prevail at being rich and retaining their wealth, using social conformity and, most importantly, making sure to keep these codes enforced­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ — Wharton plants Newland Archer, who belongs deeply to family and tradition, yet who also finds himself in growing conflict with these forces, craving more from life, and wanting to rebel. This conflict is incarnate in Archer’s loveless fidelity to his fiancée (and later, wife) May Welland, a physically, intellectually, and emotionally perfect creation of society, with no agency beyond clan preservation; and by Archer’s passion and love for Ellen Olenska, also a clan member and May’s exotic cousin, who temporarily freed herself via Europe, only to return to New York, chastened, hopeful, seeking reprieve and safety within its confines, having separated from her philandering, worldly, morally bankrupt Polish count husband. Uniquely and excitingly herself, Olenska is not afraid to flout conventions, and though she reciprocates Archer’s devotion, it’s complicated. Archer tells her, after not seeing her for some time, in a steamy and chaste carriage ride: “Each time you happen to me all over again.” But theirs is a love story with a paradoxical twist: in Wharton’s vision, Archer and Olenska can only prevail by sacrificial imperative. In order to keep the kiln burning, they must abandon each other for the greater good; otherwise their love will be sullied and, no doubt, degenerate into the common.
Wharton knew a great deal about unrequited love, having had a lifelong, unreciprocated love for her close friend, the lawyer Walter Berry, who, naturally, was unworthy of such devotion. She remained in an awful marriage to Edward “Teddy” Wharton, or “cerebrally compromised Teddy,” as Henry James privately christened him. Mentally ill and an alcoholic, Teddy never worked, living off their inheritances and her income. After he embezzled Wharton’s money to house one of his mistresses, she finally divorced him.
People, as Wharton so beautifully reveals in The Age of Innocence, are creatures of their environments, their physical surroundings and psychological makeups inescapably connected. As Wharton noted in her Yale University honorary talk (again, like the Pulitzer, the first woman to receive the honor): “Character and scenic detail are in fact one to the novelist who has fully assimilated his material,” and “the impression produced by a landscape, a street or a house should always, to the novelist, be an event in the history of the soul.”
In her short story “The Fullness of Life,” Wharton wrote, “I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms.” Ellen Olenska’s drawing room reminds me of Wharton, Olenska’s “skillful use of a few properties,” having transformed it “into something intimate, ‘foreign,’ subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments.”
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Edith Wharton&#8217;s Characters Were Products of Their Environment

<h4>Victoria Patterson is the author of Drift, a book of stories, and three novels: This Vacant Paradise, The Peerless Four, and&nbsp;The&nbsp;Little Brother. Her second collection of stories,&nbsp;The Secret Habit of Sorrow,&nbsp;published July 2018.</h4>

Victoria Patterson

A Nice Hobby, Like Knitting: On Barbara Pym

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Minding Other People’s Business: On Dawn Powell

"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead." — Samuel Goldwyn

Biography &amp; Autobiography

Love Me Back

Fatally Cleaved

Queens of Noise

No Girls Allowed: On “Queens of Noise”

"I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds." — Dizzy Gillespie

Music

The Executioner's Song

Zeitoun

Refusal to Cooperate: The Afterlife of "Zeitoun"

Summer of Hate

The Strangeness of Reality: Chris Kraus’s Summer of Love

Not Pretty: On Edith Wharton and Jonathan Franzen

Victoria Patterson is the author of Drift, a book of stories, and three novels: This Vacant Paradise, The Peerless Four, and&nbsp;The&nbsp;Little Brother. Her second collection of stories,&nbsp;The Secret Habit of Sorrow,&nbsp;published July 2018.