Yet in myriad ways, Segal's backdrop is — at first glance, at least — as hermetically sealed as Old New York. It's not only that the bride-to-be's love rival is her cousin — everybody is related, if not by blood then by marriage or work or an unfortunate episode at someone's bar mitzvah 15 years earlier. 

Just like Old New York, this is a community that has its own way of doing things, and The Innocents takes its cue from Wharton's anthropological musings, doubling as a primer on the importance of the Friday night dinner, the symbolism of Rosh Hashanah, and the evolution of the Christmakah party. 

For Adam, eyeing 30 and the rebellion he was too insecure to indulge as a teen, it's "as if their lives were one long snaking, predetermined conga line". But tradition in NW11 is not the tradition of 1870s New York. This is continuity shaped by a history of wrenching discontinuity, of successive generations born in different countries to their parents. Segal — daughter of the late Erich Segal, author of Love Story — is a writer of instinctive warmth who can divertingly lavish a full page on a breakfast spread, yet she never loses sight of this haunted truth. 

Whereas The Age of Innocence foreshadows the end of an era, The Innocents is set in an age that reveres individualism. The era that must draw to a close here is strictly personal; the innocence lost is in no way communal, it's Adam's, it's Rachel's. Though their story is what propels Segal's novel, this crucial distinction between the two books makes the community she depicts seem all the more rare, all the more precious. As she notes, "There was no life event — marriage, birth, parenthood or loss — through which one need ever walk alone. Twenty-five people were always poised to help. The other side of interference was support." In the end, it is to be treasured.