Pauline Manford’s schedule is the first thing you need to know about her. Her schedule is her attribute: St. Paul had his sword, Pauline has the 1920s forerunner of iCal. In Edith Wharton’s Twlight Sleep (1927), it is not a gadget that keeps the wealthy protagonist on task; it is rather an intelligent, working-class, overly capable secretary—a woman, of course.

Here is Pauline’s calendar for one standard morning:

7.30 Mental uplift. 7.45 Breakfast. 8. Psycho-analysis. 8.15 See cook.8.30 Silent Meditation. 8.45 Facial massage. 9. Man with Persian miniatures. 9.15 Correspondence. 9.30 Manicure. 9.45 Eurhythmic exercises. 10. Hair waved. 10.15 Sit for bust. 10.30 Receive Mothers’ Day deputation. 11. Dancing Lesson. 11.30 Birth Control committee... (9-10)

… and so on an so forth. Pauline cannot sit still; she must fill every minute with misguided crusades, excess home improvements, the planning and execution of perfect society dinners, various spiritual fads, patronage activities, and a consistent effort to “minimize her hips” and her wrinkles. Ouch. You get the picture.

Pauline is a woman who will address the “Mother’s Day deputation” (advocating large families) and host tea for the “Birth Control committee” (advocating a choice in the matter), both before lunch. The gall! The irony! And wait, there’s more: Pauline’s secretary rattles off this schedule to explain why her employer can’t see her nineteen-year-old daughter that morning. For the whole of this novel, the only thing as relentless as Pauline Manford’s busy-busy schedule is Wharton’s characterization of her.

Twilight Sleep is not my favorite book. But I bring it up here because it represents two of my favorite categories of book. One is the I’ve Never Heard of That variety, as in: a book you’ve never heard of by a prolific author you think you’ve read all of. In a book browser’s version of the “cute meet,” I wasn’t looking for anything in particular—or anything all, since I was already neck-deep in book boxes for a move—when I ran across Twilight Sleep on a bookshop front table.Twilight Sleep? By Edith Wharton? What have we here?

You don’t have to wait long for an explication of the title. The first chapter of the novel closes with a retrospective narrative about how Pauline “took charge of the business” of her frightened and frivolous daughter-in-law’s birth plan. Pauline “of course knew the most perfect ‘Twilight Sleep’ establishment in the country.” In that fancy maternity clinic, her daughter-in-law can “drift” “unperceivingly” and “lightly” into motherhood:

Of course there ought to be no Pain… nothing but Beauty… It ought to be one of the loveliest, most poetic things in the world to have a baby,” Mrs. Manford declared, in that bright efficient voice which made loveliness and poetry sound like the attributes of an advanced industrialism.(18)

No, Wharton's satire is not subtle. And it's not trying to be.

Which brings me round to the second category of favorite book into which Twilight Sleep fits for me, namely: The Not That Good or Even Formally Awkward Book That Nonetheless Proves Fun to Talk About. “Fun” in a literary critical sense: the book is fascinating in part because of its very awkwardness. And “fun,” too for the range of topics Wharton tucks into this clunky narrative: birth control, women’s property rights and professionalism, the emergence of movie celebrity culture, family structures and divorce, Western adaptations of (vaguely) Eastern spiritual and religious practices, psychological treatment fads, and the responsible stewardship of land. The book almost baits you into a fallacy of anticipation, into making banal claims like, for example, “Wharton’s novel anticipates contemporary debate about abortion rights.” (More on this issue, and this critical fallacy, to come.)

That summary of subject headings for Twilight Sleep might indicate dreary overcrowding. But Twilight Sleep is also zany. Its social satire catches young New York debutantes in a tabloid scandal over nudism at the faux-ashram of a faux-“Mahatma!” An Italian would-be film star playboy named Michelangelo tempts the aforementioned daughter-in-law! And toward its end, Twilight Sleep takes a Gatsby-ish hairpin violent turn! Shots are fired in Pauline’s perfectly ordered house. You’ve pretty much known what’s going to happen in this novel from its opening pages, but the final bit turns chaotic and wild.

Though Twilight Sleep is not an unqualified “recommended read,” I don’t want to spoil the ending.Instead, I’d like to hear what others’ Not Great But Fascinating or I Thought I’d Read All of X Writer books are.

(Page numbers refer to Wharton, Twilight Sleep. 1927. New York: Scribner, 1997.)