My Fair Lazy - Jen Lancaster [112]
Weakness?
Want?
Nope. Welty.
Specifically Eudora Welty.
I’ve been diligently working my way through the classic novels list that my friend Jen put together for me. Mostly I’ve been reading them on my Kindle because classics are dirt-cheap that way.218
However, not long ago I found myself at the bookstore unexpectedly,219 and there were a few titles I hadn’t yet downloaded. I didn’t have my list with me, so I tried to remember what I didn’t have. I knew there was some book written by a woman with the initials E.W. but I couldn’t remember who or what. I asked for help.
I located a clerk and said, “Hi, I’m looking for a classic novel but I can’t for the life of me remember who wrote it. I can picture her name, though, and her initials are E.W.”
The clerk immediately pointed me in the direction of a summer reading display. “You probably want Edith Wharton or Eudora Welty.” Wow. Incidentally, I’ve yet to stump a bookstore clerk, video store employee, or wine shop cashier with what I always assume are out-of-the-ordinary requests.
(You have no idea how much this impresses me. They should probably make a reality show about this. I’d totally watch.)
Anyway, I bought both Edith Wharton and Eudora Welty and figured I had my bases covered. As it turns out, Jen meant for me to get Evelyn Waugh, who, I should mention, isn’t even a chick.220
I immediately fell in love with Edith Wharton, toggling back and forth between The Age of Innocence on my Kindle and The House of Mirth in paperback. Her style is deceptively breezy because her wit is so biting. In her novels, she painstaking catalogues the messed-up social mores of the Upper East Side glitterati.
This, in Jen-speak, means I totally develop a girl crush on her.
Wharton prompts me to send gushing e-mails to my agent, saying stuff like:
The strangest thought occurred to me today—without the vicious social satire of Edith Wharton, we’d never have had a Blair Waldorf. Personality- and circumstance-wise, they seemed to have an awful lot in common
Also, I think this may be why Gossip Girl is so popular with you gals in publishing—it is RAMPANT with nods to all kinds of books. For example, having Lily marry Bart Bass? Lily Bart? Sound familiar? And isn’t Newland Archer awfully similar to, oh, say . . . Nate Archibald? Same kind of character, too. And Wharton loved to make plays on names; ergo, Chuck Bass becomes Chuck Bastard in a minute. Or perhaps it’s a wink to Faulkner, because Chuck Bass is a motherless boy? (She died and now his mother is a fish.)
After going on and on about my brilliant discoveries to Fletch, I mention how Kate sent me a link to a twenty-five-page comparison of a certain Gossip Girl episode to The Age of Innocence, which prompts him to wonder, “Is it that you discovered this literary connection, or is this maybe one of those cases when you’re the last horse to cross the finish line?”
While Wharton helped me get in touch with my inner cognoscente, Welty made me want to slap babies. I specifically picked up Welty’s Delta Wedding because I liked the title and the concept appealed to me. According to the book jacket, this is a “sometimes-riotous portrait of a Southern family.” Since there’s almost nothing I dig more than some old-fashioned Southern dysfunction, full of mint juleps and creeping vines and creepy uncles and no-necked monsters, I figured I’d take to it like a kudzu to a telephone pole.221
What I didn’t count on was my developing an urge to maim myself and others rather than read one more frigging description of spready ferns and golden-winged butterflies and skies the color of violets and snow-white moons and can something please happen because oh, my God, enough with the descriptions stop already!222
I did a Google search to see if I’m the only one to have such a visceral reaction to Delta Wedding. As it turns out, I’m not. The consensus is that once one gets fifty pages in, the pace quickens, but I wasn’t sure I could make it that far without kicking my pets or something. Others suggested the reader take a piece of paper and draw