EBTo celebrate the on-sale day of Hello Goodbye, Emily Chenoweth has graciously agreed to share some of her favorite books with us. Interestingly, this marks the first time I’ve ever heard anyone sing the praises of Northanger Abbey . . .
Strangers in Paradise
By Emily Chenoweth
The summer I was nineteen, my family and I spent a week at The Mount Washington Hotel, a turn-of-the century Spanish Renaissance extravagance deep in the woods of New Hampshire. I remember being awed by the Tiffany glass, the dinnertime orchestra, and the elaborately coiffed women in resort wear. It seemed like the setting for a fairy tale—and whatever that fairy tale might be, I was ready to be its heroine. I believed I’d check out of that hotel a different, more exciting person than I had been when I checked in.
These three books describe a similar situation—one in which a young person visits a place of luxury quite foreign to his or her own circumstances, and emerges somehow transfigured.
(Unlike these fictional folks, I was not, in the end, transformed by my stay at the Mount Washington Hotel. But I used a hotel very much like it for the setting of my novel, Hello Goodbye, so all was definitely not lost.)
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh’s beautiful, devastating novel follows Charles Ryder, a middle-class aspiring artist, from wide-eyed youth to disillusioned middle age. Charles befriends flamboyant Sebastian Flyte in college, later visiting him at his family’s palatial estate. The two fall in love—with each other, after a fashion, but perhaps more with being young in a place of beauty. “The languor of Youth—how unique and quintessential it is,” Charles reflects. “How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!” The two find that luxury does not bring ease: Sebastian descends into alcoholism and Charles eventually begins a complicated relationship with Sebastian’s sister. Brideshead Revisited—which Waugh once called his magnum opus—is a searing look at fading youth and blossoming faith.
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
When Catherine Morland, the charmingly credulous 17-year-old heroine of Jane Austen’s comedic first novel, arrives for a sojourn at the grand, Gothic house of the Tilney family, she is more prepared for horror than opulence. As a lover of dark, Gothic tales, Catherine believes her temporary home must hold appropriately monstrous secrets. A mysterious manuscript she discovers turns out to be nothing but a laundry list, but this doesn’t deter her from further fantasy: she becomes convinced that the master of the house is keeping his wife—ostensibly deceased—locked in an unused wing of the abbey. Her suspicions are encouraged by handsome Henry Tilney, who enjoys her flights of fancy. But Catherine, like other good-hearted Jane Austen heroines, comes to understand her folly, grows up, marries, and lives happily ever after in improved financial circumstances.
Evening by Susan Minot
A wealthy family’s Maine estate serves as a backdrop to young love in Minot’s mesmerizing Evening. Ann Grant, a seamstress’s daughter from Boston, travels to a Maine island for the wedding of her best friend, Lila Wittenborn, where she meets a charismatic and seductive—not to mention engaged—doctor named Harris Arden. Though Ann has become familiar with the privileged life of the Wittenborns, she’s an innocent when it comes to romance. Minot’s observations on class are subtle but astute—as Lila informs Ann, “In New England the rich let old things stay old”—and her descriptions of Ann’s love-addled state are perfect. What makes the novel larger than a simple love story is the fact that this is all told in flashbacks, as Ann, now 65 and dying of cancer, imagines that Harris has come to her bedside to be with her in her final days.
Ironically, The Mount Washington Hotel was in foreclosure that summer we were there. In my dad’s words, “it was a dump.” That it’s now been restored to its Rockefeller-era glory is beside the point. It simply proves that in matters of youthful expectation, architecture often counts for less than imagination.
