The Flirt — Book Summary & Review

The Flirt is built around Valentine Corliss’s “effeminacy” performance—half tailoring, half social reading—and Booth Tarkington keeps tightening the screw on how people decide what they’re looking at. On the surface, the plot is a summer comedy of manners: Valentine drifts through a steamy Indiana season in a white-serge suit shaped to draw attention, while the town’s observers treat clothing as a personality test. Tarkington’s narrator doesn’t just describe the heat; he uses it as a pressure system that makes every glance feel consequential, right down to the tailor’s craft “far from Corliss Street,” where the coat’s resemblance to Trouville or Ostende styles becomes a sneaky argument about class and taste. The core tension is that Valentine’s look is “effeminacy” only because others need it to mean something. Tarkington then escalates from surface judgment to moral accounting: Valentine’s behavior gets interpreted through the same lens as his outfit, and that interpretive habit starts to infect everyone around him.

One concrete example: Tarkington lingers on the way the coat “attracted a little attention” from those “able to observe anything except the heat.” That line isn’t a throwaway joke—it’s the book’s method. He’s showing how limited observation gets dressed up as certainty. Another example: the novel’s early focus on the tailor as an “artist” reframes authorship itself; the town thinks Valentine is the author of his identity, but Tarkington keeps pointing to the machinery behind the performance. Still, The Flirt won’t please readers who want a tightly plotted romance payoff or a modern, emotionally explicit inner life; it’s more interested in social optics and literary criticism of manners than in satisfying contemporary expectations of intimacy. If you came for constant plot propulsion, you may feel the novel’s brain is doing more work than its heart.