Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

This book surprised me.  I have read a few books by Edith Wharton, and they were all set among New York high society.  This book is set in rural New England and deals with very poor people, which was a big change.  The narrative set-up of the story felt very awkward to me.  The narrator is a visitor to the town who meets the older Ethan Frome and tells the story that happened many years earlier as he learned it.  It doesn't feel like a realistic device as it is never clear how he could possibly have learned the story he tells.  The story is about Ethan Frome, who married a "sickly" woman who is tyrannical in her bad humor and her sickness.  She has a distant cousin who has come to help take care of her, who is a charming, happy young girl.  Ethan falls in love with her, and she with him.  (This reads strangely, since Frome wonders and worries about whether she feels the same about him in one chapter, and then in the next it seems their relationship is a foregone conclusion.)  The wife seems to suspect them, but regardless of what she knows, she makes it so the cousin has to leave.  Ethan wants to leave with her but doesn't feel he can.  On their way to the train station, they detour to take a ride on a sled.  The girl suggests they kill themselves by crashing into a tree on the sled, which they try.  Instead they are horribly crippled.  In the end of the story, they all three still live together in the same house, and the wife and young girl are both querulous invalids, although the wife improved after the accident.  

Obviously, it is a very depressing story!  Wharton loves to write about forbidden love, which she usually does in an interesting way, even if it isn't my favorite topic.  I felt like she wasn't as aware of her characters and their lives as she usually is in her society settings.  And I really didn't like the conclusion.  It's really short, though, and an easy read, so it is probably still worth the short amount of time it takes just for its classic aspects.