One of his five best books on lovers touching hands, as told to the Wall Street Journal:
Ethan FromeRead about another novel in the list.
by Edith Wharton (1911)
Chaste love happens all the time, far more frequently than adultery. Ethan's love for his wife's cousin Mattie is stymied and silent. They live in the same house, brush by each other at all hours. Neither dares to say or do anything. One day Ethan's "drawn and bloodless" wife needs to leave town to see a doctor. The lovers are left alone in the house. Each knows what the other longs for, but they cannot act. After dinner, Mattie is hemming a strip of cloth while Ethan sits close by. He had thought that perhaps something might inspire him to a"harmless caress," but their speech is more strained than ever. "She sat silent, her hands clasped on her work, and it seemed to him that a warm current flowed toward him along the strip of stuff that still lay unrolled between them. Cautiously he slid his hand palm-downward along the table till his fingertips touched the end of the stuff. A faint vibration of her lashes seemed to show that she was aware of his gesture, and that it had sent a counter-current back to her; and she let her hands lie motionless on the other end of the strip." A moment later Ethan will bend down to kiss the strip of cloth. Edith Wharton's gaze is mercilessly keen. The lovers never touch, but we are back to Sterne and to the counter-currents that each is thrilled by and scared to intercept.
Ethan Frome is among Aciman's five notable novellas of unconsummated loves, John Mullan's ten best women writing as men in literature, and Lynda Resnick's best books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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