The Golden House
1894
It is midnight in a Manhattan studio, and a glittering crowd of senators' wives, Boston scholars, and diplomatic stars has gathered to watch a Spanish dancer lift the veil on an ancient art. They are消thrilling to the edge of propriety, these respectable people, intoxicated by their own daring. Among them are Jack Delancy and his wife Edith, whose marriage has begun to fray under the weight of his restless ambition and her nagging sense that charity is not the same as goodness. Warner paints a portrait of the 1890s Gilded Age in full: a world where money is everywhere and meaning is scarce, where bohemian artists and high society orbit each other with mutual fascination and mutual disdain. The Golden House is a novel about the seductions of transgression, how delicious it feels to watch something forbidden, and how quickly that thrill curdles into something more complicated when you have to live with what you've seen. It is sharp, observant, and surprisingly dark for a book that begins at a party.
Editions
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“This is how we are: we fall in love with each other’s strengths, but love deepens towards permanence when we fall in love with each other’s weaknesses.””
— Charles Dudley Warner
“America had left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe.””
— Charles Dudley Warner
“It had been more than a year since the Joker’s conquest of America and we were all still in shock and going through the stages of grief but now we needed to come together and set love and beauty and solidarity and friendship against the monstrous forces that faced us. Humanity was the only answer to the cartoon. I had no plan except love. I hoped another plan might emerge in time but for now there was only holding each other tightly and passing strength to each other, body to body, mouth to mouth, spirit to spirit, me to you.””
— Charles Dudley Warner
“How does one live amongst one’s fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don’t know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty-million-plus who brought the horror to power, when you can’t tell who should be counted among the ninety-million-plus who shrugged and stayed home, or when your fellow Americans tell you that knowing things is elitist and they hate elites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not that knowledge-is-power nonsense, but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed…””
— Charles Dudley Warner
“We fell into the love that had been lying beneath our love like water below ice, and understood that while we had been having a lot of fun together we had only been skating on the surface, and now we were in as deep as we could go.””
— Charles Dudley Warner
“The old man has always believed in the mutability of things; has known that no matter how solid the ground beneath your feet may seem, it can, at any moment, turn into quicksand and suck you down. Always be prepared.””
— Charles Dudley Warner
“In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain- hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause- will claim to be great leaders and benefactors, acting in the common good, and calling all who oppose them liars, envious, little people, stupid people, stiff, and, in a precise reversal of the truth, dishonest and corrupt.””
— Charles Dudley Warner
“It did not occur to any of them that their decision was born of a colossal sense of entitlement, this notion that they could just step away from yesterday and start tomorrow as if it wasn't a part of the same week, to move beyond memory and roots and language and race into the land of the self-made self, which is another way of saying, America.””
— Charles Dudley Warner
“In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain – hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause – will claim to be great leaders””
— Charles Dudley Warner
