The Fifth Wheel: A Novel

Ruth Vars is a young woman with everything and nothing. Born into the rarefied air of upper-class New England, she possesses the correct pedigree, the correct connections, and a coming-out party arranged down to the flower arrangements. What she lacks is any conviction that her life belongs to her. As she prepares to be presented to society, Ruth finds herself haunted by a restlessness she cannot name, a sense that she is多余, surplus to her own existence. When Breckenridge Sewall enters her world, he offers a glimpse of something that might feel like choice. But can one woman really refuse the script she's been handed, or will she simply become another elegant fixture in a room full of people living someone else's plot? Prouty, whose novel Stella Dallas made her a literary sensation, returns to the terrain she knew best: the painful, often silent war between who a woman is expected to be and who she might actually become. The novel pulses with a quiet urgency that still resonates, a century later, we still recognize that hollow feeling of being the fifth wheel in our own lives.