Edith Wharton's The Glimpses of the Moon (1922)

Even in the light of her far-seeing cleverness, and of his own present bliss, he knew the future would not bear the examination of sober thought.
--Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon

One of the pleasures of the periodicals I read --from "The New York Times" to "The New Criterion" -- is the books they introduce me to or remind me of.  A case in point is Michael Gorra's recent essay about Edith Wharton in "The New York Review of Books," which reminded me that there is still some Edith Wharton I have not read.  So I picked up The Glimpses of the Moon, a strange and funny novel about Nick Lansing and Susy Branch, who have little money themselves but many wealthy friends and who decide to get married and live off the presents and hospitality given to honeymooners.  In some ways it is a more positive and comic version of the  superior The House of Mirth, though still with an underlying cynicism about marriage and wealth.

I do admit that I find the idea of getting married with the idea that if it doesn't work out you can always get divorced rather strange and off-putting, just as Maria Tallchief did when George Balanchine proposed to her on those terms (the marriage lasted six years).  And for a long time divorce was mainly available to the wealthy and could be a stigma for some.  My father, for instance, did not want my mother to associate with "divorcees" and when my cousin became the first Soule to get divorced it caused great consternation in the family.  In New York State the only grounds for divorce, until 1966, was adultery and New York was the last state to allow no-fault divorce, in 2010.

The difficulty about trenchant decisions was that the next morning they generally left one facing a void.
--The Glimpses of the Moon

After Susy and Nick split, over an ethical dilemma, she gets a job taking care of children and he goes back to his writing; they find their jobs immensely more satisfying than hanging out with the well-off on yachts and in clothing stores and restaurants.  The Glimpses of the Moon is beautifully and elegantly written as well as being an effectively deadpan satire.

The impulse which had first drawn them together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never again let them go.

Incidentally,  the film version of The Glimpses of the Moon, directed by Allan Dwan in 1923, is part of the 70% of American silent films that are now considered lost.  I recommend, instead, Ernst Lubitsch's film Trouble in Paradise (1932), a similarly brilliant satire.