House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.
The beginning of Book two can be characterized with a masking of the primary themes of early on in Book one. No longer is this simple cliche love story, rather a complicated who-done-it of lies and dealings. For me, it is hard to follow the web of lies that the Dorsets, Rosedale, Trenor, Ned Silverton, and Lily have weaved. I can understand how these lies came about, but I cannot see how any of them can continue to keep up the charade. I have seen some convoluted lies and tall tales that bare a resemblance to this instance, but from the original themes of the story that dictated that individuality and happiness were one in the same, I could have never guessed how this plot could have come about. I guess that it should have been obvious how this should have happened, it always is in hindsight. I probably could have figured out that Lily would have ended up in a financial nightmare after learning of her habitual gambling and frivolous spending, but the author did a good job of masking that outstanding eventuality with detail and diction that kept me in the now of the story. I guess that Wharton intentionally made it so that the original "message necessarily left large gaps for conjecture" (Wharton, 168), otherwise, it wouldn't be a good story. After all, predictable stories are almost always boring.
I am eager to find how this web of lies and dealings will untangle.
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