The Wharton Plot
New York City, 1911: Edith Wharton, famed Gilded Age novelist, is at a crossroads in her life. She has doubts about her writing talent, her marriage to Teddy Wharton, friends in her circle of wealthy and accomplished people, and the ways that modern America is evolving. She becomes involved in the murder investigation of a controversial fellow novelist and decides to track down the culprit.
Fredericks develops the murder plot with a deft hand. Several plausible villains with suspicious motives appear, and Mrs. Wharton pursues them even when she begins to receive anonymous threatening notes. Fredericks builds suspense with careful details, but when the killer is identified in the very last pages of the novel, one wonders how the protagonist did not see it coming. But what is of perhaps greater interest, the novel pursues and unravels the novelist’s complicated persona. Wharton was a great friend of Henry James, the acclaimed “Father of the Psychological Novel.” Wharton was often compared with James, and Fredericks herself does the Master justice in her careful, absorbing analysis of Edith Wharton. (“Henry,” by the way, is a character in the novel and lives several stories above the Whartons in the Belmont Hotel.)
The descriptions of Manhattan’s changing physical environment, the evolution of the American political and social milieu and, most importantly, the complicated psychological drama of an American female icon make this novel worth burning the midnight oil for.
