The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Somewhere in this book, Wharton observes that smart liars always find good stories to support their fiction, but truly smart liars don't bother to explain anything. This is exactly the insight that makes the Age of Innocence so indispensable. Wharton's story about the upper classes of Old New York and Newland Archer's impossible love for the shameful Countess of Olenska is a perfectly constructed book about a period when upper-class culture in the United States was still a mixture of American and European essences, and society had rules as strict as any rule in history.
