Except for its title, which misses the mark, Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever" is an exquisite and near-perfect short story. I'm not sure if I would love it quite so much if I hadn't recently indulged myself with an Edithathon of 25 or 30 long novels, of which "Roman Fever" is a quintessence or distillation. Packed into a few pages is all you would ever need to know about formal, repressed, rule-bound upper-class New York society in which no-holds-barred competitiveness is masked by lifted-pinky manners. The story is so cleverly designed that the last satisfying sentence more than fulfills a reader's wickedest expectations.
Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade, both well-tended New York widows who've pretended to like each other for a lifetime, chat on a Roman balcony. Each is expert at at one-upmanship. Their apparent friendship masks hatreds and sexual jealousies as obvious (once the curtain is lifted) and as brutal as those of lions living in the less habitable portions of the Kalahari desert.
I know of no work of fiction that is at once so polite and so ferocious. And so chilling.
Comments