Flint: His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes

Maud Wilder Goodwin's forgotten masterpiece opens with a brilliant conceit: a house party at Nepaug Beach filtered through Miss Susan Standish's journal, where the fog rolling in from the Atlantic becomes a perfect metaphor for the murkiness of human motive. Jonathan Flint arrives at the inn troubled, his "faults" and "fortunes" already trailing behind him like weather. Through Susan's keen observational eye, we watch Flint navigate the delicate negotiations of Gilded Age leisure: the forced sociability, the romantic entanglements, the quiet cruelties of the comfortably idle. Goodwin has a novelist's instinct for what remains unsaid. The women at this beach party are particularly sharp creations, gossiping and watching with an intensity that suggests the real drama happens between the lines of polite conversation. This is a novel about a man learning, perhaps too late, that the self he has constructed may be no self at all. The fog lifts. The truths don't.