On the Surface, a Love Story

Why would anyone read a novel thirty times? Roxane Gay, the essayist and memoirist behind Bad Feminist and Hunger, has done it with Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence; Wharton is her favorite writer. This opening episode makes her case: what a love story set in the Gilded Age is about, and what these rich New Yorkers did with their days; that answer lands startlingly close to the present. Then the novel begins, at a brand-new opera house where nobody in the boxes is watching the stage, and beneath the smaller laws of Newland Archer's world she finds the one that explains the rest; living under it costs something.