Review: A Classic and a Good Read
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 21, 2012
The Age of Innocence, a classic, is often assigned in high school and college.  Classics can be good but difficult to read and boring.  This book is easy to read.  But if you are looking for a cheerful story, skip this one.I read this book because a friend of mine, whose parents immigrated to the U.S., thought it was fascinating.  From her cultural perspective, the characters' feelings and actions were difficult to understand.  I am a  13th generation American and have ancestors from the main ethnic groups in this novel.  Some of them lived in the time and location in which this story takes place.  I found the characters all too easy to understand.  This story is about the conflict of cultural demands and interpretations versus interpersonal relationships.  For people like me, it is also about the defects of that culture.  Although I had already spotted most of those defects myself, it did reveal a few things for me.  For example, I never understood why my mother got hysterical  about finding the perfect dress for social occasions.  Unlike one of the protagonists in this book, she was not good at picking one but thought it was extremely important to do it correctly.  Though more relaxed than my mother, I still worry about the perfect dress!  All cultures place expectations on people.  Usually people are able to live pretty well within their bounds.  This book is about what can happen when they cannot.