Ethan Frome

A young engineer put on hold for his job in a small town in Massachusetts watches an aging crippled man pick up a magazine and an envelope of medicine at the post office. It is winter and the atmosphere of the town is claustrophobic. The educated appearance of the man, the age that does not correspond to his physique, the mysterious silences and precautions that his presence arouses in others, his almost isolated life in a dilapidated farm with two women, lead the engineer to wonder why he continues to live in a place where, as the locals say, "almost all the smart ones leave". But the man has a reason for not having left, or for having tried and never succeeded: a story in which the fatality of destiny and all the subtleties of forbidden love are mixed. Ethan Frome (1911) is a nouvelle whose setting - the towns and forests of New England - is a tradition of the most distinguished American literature (from Hawthorne to Lovecraft) but an exception in an essentially modern and urban novelist like Edith Wharton. However, since its publication, it would not cease to be one of her most characteristic works, one of the most celebrated examples of her sensitivity and style. A true American classic and a true lesson in narrative art.