Campaign for the American Reader: Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "The House of Mirth" and "The Writing of Fiction"

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "The House of Mirth" and "The Writing of Fiction"

D.W. Buffa's recent novel is The Privilege, the ninth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. The tenth, Lunatic Carnival, will be published soon. He has also just published Neumann's Last Concert, the fourth novel in a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, finally, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa writes a monthly review for the Campaign for the American Reader that we're calling "Third Reading." Buffa explains. "I was reading something and realized that it was probably the third time that I knew it well enough to write something about it. The first is when I read it when

I was in college or in my twenties, the second, however many years later, when I wanted to see if it was as good as I remembered, and the third when I knew I was going to have to write about it."

Buffa's "Third Reading" of The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton begins:

If you had, like a medieval scholar, spent years in the intensive study of the works of Aristotle, you would remember, if you remembered nothing else, the line with which the great philosopher opened so many of the tightly-reasoned things he wrote: “The beginning is more than half.” If you had not studied Aristotle you might still have a sense of how important, how essential, the beginning is if you had read Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Published in 1905, it was her ninth novel and the first to become a great popular success, with 140,000 copies in print within the three first months it became available. The first paragraph reads:

“Seldon paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.” Then, a few lines later: “There was nothing new about Lily Bart, yet he could never see her without a faint movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions.”

Toward the end of the page, the first page of the novel, Edith Wharton adds that Seldon had rarely seen Miss Bart more “radiant,” that she had, “against the dull tints of the crowd…regained the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing. Was it really eleven years, Seldon found himself wondering, and had she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her?”

When Edith Wharton was a very young child...[read on]

About Buffa's recent novel Neumann’s Last Concert, from the publisher:

Neumann’s Last Concert is a story about music and war and the search for what led to the greatest evil in modern history. It is the story of an American boy, Wilfred Malone, who lost his father in the early days of the Second World War and a German refugee, Isaac Neumann, the greatest concert pianist of his age when he lived in Berlin, but who now lives, anonymous and alone, in a single rented room in a small town a few miles from San Francisco.

Wilfred has a genius for the piano, “a keen curiosity not yet corrupted by vanity” and “a memory that forgot nothing essential.” Neumann, alone in his room, is constantly writing, an endless labyrinth of questions and answers, driving him farther and farther back into the past, searching for the causes, searching for the meaning, of what happened in Germany, trying to understand what had led him, a German Jew, to stay in Germany when he could have left but instead continued to perform right up to the night that during his last concert they took his wife away.

Neumann’s Last Concert is a novel about the great catastrophe of the 20th century and the way in which music, great music, preserves both the hope of human decency amidst the carnage of human insanity and the possibility of what human beings might still accomplish.