Newland Is Accepting His Fate

Roxane Gay covers a short stretch of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence in which Newland, in her phrase, is "willing to risk it all." He plans a trip to Washington to see Ellen, builds a cover story adjacent to the truth, and is spared the trip when May's grandmother has a stroke and summons Ellen home. May catches the lie. She doesn't say so. Both of them know. Gay finds what goes said and unsaid here as fascinating as anything in the plot.

The turn is May's cooling toward her cousin, which she can't voice without cracking the facade of their lives; Gay asks what May would say if she ever said what she felt. In the background sits the Beaufort financial scandal, and Ellen, back in New York, pays a call on Regina Beaufort. Right and decent, Gay says, and also wrong, which makes it one more metaphor for the Gilded Age. All that glitters is far from gold.