‘The Innocents’ by Francesca Segal
God, how I adore this book. I finished it last night and am already starting to feel somewhat bereft. Four hundred and thirty-six pages I’ve gulped down, in a relatively short space of time, and yet I wish there were four hundred and thirty-six more still to come. I may even just pick it up and start all over again. It was through last month’s issue of British Vogue that I found out about The Innocents, and a routine visit to Waterstone’s this past Thursday reminded me of its existence. So I bought it, opened it up on the way home, and didn’t really stop reading until, well, just last night. Whenever I put the book down I did so with great reluctance, and then only in order to fulfil the most basic human needs. And believe me, I delayed them all for as long as I could. That’s how you know you’re reading a great novel, when you find yourself letting the old MRS NERG business fall by the wayside. Anyway, I digress…
The Innocents was published just last summer and is journalist and critic Francesca Segal’s first novel. It is also a modern-day reinterpretation of Edith Wharton’s 1920 classic, and one of my all-time favourite books, The Age of Innocence. Segal’s decision to reinterpret such a well-loved work may raise a few eyebrows (my initial reaction was, admittedly, a big fat WHY?) however, having devoured this new novel in a couple of sittings I can honestly say that I get it. And then some. The Innocents takes Wharton’s characters, Newland Archer and Countess Olenska among them, out of 1870s’ New York and deposits them in twenty-first century London - Hampstead Garden Suburb, to be specific. Hampstead Garden Suburb is a close-knit Jewish community in north-west London, one which expects certain standards of its members. Furthermore, while The Age of Innocence opens with Newland Archer gazing at Countess Olenska across the opera house, The Innocents begins with the same exchange set in a synagogue.
In The Innocents, Newland Archer has been recast as Adam Newman, a young lawyer who finds himself in something of a dilemma when his wife-to-be’s beguiling cousin shows up out of nowhere, catching his eye and his heart. The cousin in question is Ellie Schneider, our Countess Olenska, a troubled but beautiful woman who has fled New York City amid a scandal involving a married man and an ‘art house’ film. Adam is drawn to Ellie by her unique beauty and intrigued by her disregard for the many social conventions which have shaped his life thus far. Soon he must make an impossible choice between the perfectly nice life that has been mapped out for him since childhood, and the thrill of freedom and the unknown. If you have already read The Age of Innocence you will of course be familiar with these characters and the decisions they face, however The Innocents still delivers its share of surprises.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in January 2013.