Masks 
 The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; 
 but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. 
 Thus spake the writer of Ecclesiastes, giving Edith Wharton her deceptive title. Mirth and mourning, the two masks over a theater stage; Wharton pays homage to both. Book One, just over half the length of this substantial novel, is a glittering social comedy played out in turn-of-the-century New York drawing rooms and the country retreats of the very rich. Though not rich herself, Miss Lily Bart is well connected, and her extraordinary beauty gives her easy access to these charmed circles, where wealthy men clamor for her attention. Raised to the expectation of making a brilliant match, it is now high time she did so, for she is already twenty-nine. 
 The curtain rises on an even more extravagant setting for Book Two, the yachts and casinos of Monte Carlo. But its trajectory will take a tragic turn, as Lily will be forced to pay for some apparently trivial mistakes in the first part, and sink ever lower in the social scale. The fickle world of fashion was one that Wharton knew well because, like Lily, she had grown up on the fringes of it. Such people, she said, "always rest on an underpinning of wasted human possibilities"; Lily's story is at heart a tragedy of waste. 
 Though Wharton ends the book perilously close to American moralizing realists such as Norris and Dreiser, for the first three quarters she occupies a brilliant territory somewhere between Trollope and Fitzgerald. You can easily imagine Trollope writing of one character's concern, in planning a dinner party for the local rector, "that no divorcees were included, except those who had showed signs of penitence by being remarried to the very wealthy." For this is a world of masks. So long as appearances are kept up, all sorts of adulteries and dodgy financial dealings may take place behind the scenes. For all her sophistication, Lily remains an innocent, condemned by society for things she has not done. She will be brought down because another woman's willingness to lie is greater than her own to tell a truth that would harm someone else. 
 Yet some of the blame must still attach to her. At the very beginning of the book, she bumps into a good friend, Lawrence Selden, a bachelor lawyer who moves occasionally in similar circles, and makes the mistake of taking tea alone in his rooms--a mistake that unfortunately has been observed. It is a social blunder rather than a moral one, yet propriety is everything in a world of appearances. The true moral crux is that there is clearly love between Lily and Selden, and she repeatedly postpones it. High society and the pursuit of wealth mean too much. Whether this is her own failing or the product of her upbringing is almost irrelevant; when the mask is more important than the person behind it, even the most glittering of comedies will turn to tragedy.