A sober reminder that, no matter how much you desire something, sometimes everything can go the other way. Frome is in the hell of regrets, and manages to make it more hellish.

It was not a pleasant reading, as it reminded me of many nightmares where one fails to escape whatever is hounding them over a long period of time. A young man’s dreams are slowly extinguished, with no discernable culprit. This is a story that makes you suspect maledictions, curses and karma might be real.

As usual, Wharton grasps very delicately the many movements of the soul, which brings the story closer to existential torture porn.

As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back with the poignancy of vanished things. Watching Mattie whirl down the floor from hand to hand he wondered how he could ever have thought that his dull talk interested her. To him, who was never gay but in her presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference. The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.

The book is more like a short story with its punchline and its outsider narrator trying to understand what happened.