The Custom of the Country is undoubtedly a biting satire on that society which Wharton understood so very well. Here Wharton explores the society of old New York families and the emerging nouveau riche.

“She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.”

Undine Spragg – is a quite marvellous anti-heroine, her actions cannot help but appal and confound the reader. More than a hundred years after this novel was written, it is possible to see her actions, even outside the context of the times, as utterly reprehensible. Undine Spragg is the only, spoiled daughter of a self-made man. Having arrived in New York from the (fictional) city of Apex, where some business dealings of an unspecified nature have brought Mr Abner Spragg a small fortune, the Spraggs are living in a plush hotel suite. Here, the beautiful, enormously ambitious but socially naïve Undine contrives to bring herself to the height of New York society.

Full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2015/...

What a novel! I'm so glad I read this at my friend Susan's recommendation. I buddy read this with Susan and Melissa, and we've had wonderful discussions. I am so grateful that my first read of Wharton is with two thoughtful readers who know a lot about Wharton's life and the context in which she wrote. They both brought a lot of insight to the plot that I wouldn't have picked up on as clearly (or at all??) on my own. As the three of us discussed, there are so many tensions in this novel between the 'Old World' of Europe and the 'New World' of the United States and its emergence as a world power. And this is set pre-WWI, too, so that's interesting as well. I noticed a lot of parallels to Willa Cather's novels, though Wharton is coming from a different viewpoint.

The characters are so well drawn and there are plenty of love-to-hate characters and some I genuinely loved and mourned for. Wharton does some fascinating things with perspective throughout the novel. Sometimes we hear from a main character directly and sometimes we see one of the main characters through another's eyes. I think this changing perspective is effective in illuminating the characters and their blindspots. I'm curious to see if that's common in Wharton's writing or not.

Definitely recommend!

It's funny though because I actually thought the final paragraph of the novel was a bit too on-the-nose. I'm looking forward to hearing what my buddy readers think.

What a wonderful classic! The twists and turns kept me fascinated. Totally loved it!

I love The Age of Innocence but I wonder if that love is a fluke. I never finished The House of Mirth because of its coincidental encounters and melodramatic confrontations, and I was able to pass over similar faults in The Custom of the Country only because the often clunky dramatic scenes are separated by long stretches of brilliantly measured descriptive prose, acerbic dissections of manners and motivations. Also, I wanted to know how it would end. There’s a page-turning fascination to the adventures of Elmer Moffat and Undine Spragg, middle American rustics respectively backed by self-made and second-generation fortunes, who are shown in their intermittently coinciding devastations of the historiated sanctums of Washington Square and the Faubourg Saint Germain. Opening The Custom of the Country, the last thing I expected to find was a premonition of Terrence Malick’s Badlands. Wharton’s ear for Western speech is perfect; Moffat sounds exactly like Martin Sheen as Kit; the same simple words in the same spare rhythm. “Say…” Elmer and Undine’s first meeting is just like Kit and Holly’s: a boy from the wrong side of the tracks asks the local flower of what passes for gentility to take a walk with him. Elmer and Undine in Europe made me think of Kit and Holly taking hostages in that rich man’s house – the house full of delicate things the scion is too delicate to defend from intruders. And in their careers of despoilation there’s the same strange mixture of rapacity and innocence, obscenity and prudery, deadly violence and childish reasoning. Comparison of James and Wharton is usually invidious, with James coming out ahead; and yes, her dialogue rarely attains the nuance and suggestion of his – but when it comes to American types, she sure nailed us hinterlanders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKykxE...

Tan fuerte era la influencia del mundo exterior sobre ella, que nunca había sido sensible al roce del corazón.

This book is amazing. No one writes like this anymore -- in fact, after I finished this, I had a hard time getting into a more contemporary novel, because the newer book felt so spare and empty compared to Wharton's thoughtful and lovely prose. Certain paragraphs of Custom of the Country made me stop and just admire her craft; she conveys so much depth of thought in so few sentences, with precision and elegance that I've never encountered elsewhere and could never even begin to replicate. It blew me away.

Aside from that, the story is great fun, with its spunky, bratty heroine on a tear through Europe collecting suitors and clothing, Katamari Damacy-style. You might hate her, but you have to admire her power. And you have to admire Wharton's almost eerily modern ideology.

Not the equal of Age of Innocence, House of Mirth, or the finest Wharton short stories, but a fascinating character and social study. Undine may seem monstrous, but Wharton is quick to show us the imperfections of the societies into which she thrusts herself - ineffectual Old New York, repressively hindbound old Europe - as well. Wharton is never merely nostalgic; she gives the energy of the New Americans their due.

Undine is not a good or loving wife, but her husbands are equally flawed - each makes this stunning beauty a vessel for what he hopes to find - and except for one (no spoilers) takes no account of who she actually is. That can make the book a prickly one at times - there’s not really anyone to root for (except poor little Paul).

I hadn’t re-read Custom in probably 30 years, but its tart charms pleased me no less than this time around. Highly recommended.

Undine Spragg relies upon her beauty to bring her the things she wants in life---clothes, jewelry, friends, parties, admiration, respectability. And her beauty does bring her men, but each man who comes into her life, she soon realizes, is not able to bring all the things she wants, and so, after a short amount of time, she quickly discards each man for another. But discarding a man brings consequences, too, and often these result in loss of one or more of the things she wants. No man seems capable of giving her everything. She is perpetually dissatisfied.

Though Undine is markedly limited in her interests in life, what a complex character Wharton creates in Undine Spragg. I couldn't help both hating and loving Undine, being alternately drawn to and repulsed by her. And the poor men who ended up with her...how quickly most of them realized the terrible mistake they had made in choosing Undine.

A few quotes from the book:

"Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses."

"Her mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to Ralph as pathetic as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands with which her infant hands had been taught to adorn it. He was beginning to understand this, and learning to adapt himself to the narrow compass of her experience. The task of opening new windows in her mind was inspiring enough to give him infinite patience; and he would not yet own to himself that her pliancy and variety were imitative rather than spontaneous."

"She had found out that she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous..."

'It's normal for a man to work hard for a woman—what's abnormal is his not caring to tell her anything about it." "To tell Undine? She'd be bored to death if he did!" "Just so; she'd even feel aggrieved. But why? Because it's against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man's again—I don't mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven't we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don't take enough interest in THEM."'

"The flame of love that had played about his passion for his wife had died down to its embers; all the transfiguring hopes and illusions were gone, but they had left an unquenchable ache for her nearness, her smile, her touch."

"The turnings of life seldom show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing."

"(H)is musings on man's relation to his self imposed laws had shown him how little human conduct is generally troubled about its own sanctions."

"If only everyone would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable."

""A man doesn't know till he tries it how killing uncongenial work is, and how it destroys the power of doing what one's fit for, even if there's time for both."

'"And you're all alike," he exclaimed, "every one of you. You come among us from a country we don't know, and can't imagine, a country you care for so little that before you've been a day in ours you've forgotten the very house you were born in—if it wasn't torn down before you knew it! You come among us speaking our language and not knowing what we mean; wanting the things we want, and not knowing why we want them; aping our weaknesses, exaggerating our follies, ignoring or ridiculing all we care about—you come from hotels as big as towns, and from towns as flimsy as paper, where the streets haven't had time to be named, and the buildings are demolished before they're dry, and the people are as proud of changing as we are of holding to what we have—and we're fools enough to imagine that because you copy our ways and pick up our slang you understand anything about the things that make life decent and honourable for us!"'

"She could never be with people who had all the things she envied without being hypnotized into the belief that she had only to put her hand out to obtain them, and all the unassuaged rancours and hungers of her early days in West End Avenue came back with increased acuity. She knew her wants so much better now, and was so much more worthy of the things she wanted!"

"Little as she understood of the qualities that made Moffatt what he was, the results were of the kind most palpable to her. He used life exactly as she would have used it in his place. Some of his enjoyments were beyond her range, but even these appealed to her because of the money that was required to gratify them."

And, my favorite quote, from the end of the book:
"Even now, however, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them."

Someone once advised Edith Wharton, I think it was Henry James, to be successful in writing you should focus on subjects that you are familiar with and understand. For Wharton, that was New York, and the privileged upper crust society of which she was a part. Aside from Ethan Frome, her most beloved novels are three that captured the essence of this society and it's people, The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920).

The Custom of the Country produced one of Wharton's most memorable characters, Miss Undine Spragg, who came to New York from a well to do, but not socially connected, family. She finally breaks into high society when she meets and eventually marries Ralph Marvell. He has the family connections but not the wealth she is hoping for, but she has stepped on that ladder of upward mobility and she takes advantage of every opportunity from that point to fulfill her dreams. If I counted right she is married four times and has at least one significant affair during the course of the novel. I don't think she was in love with anyone but herself. Yes, Undine was a vain and very shallow young woman.

Wharton's ability to create interesting characters, captivating plots, and prose that is incredibly beautiful, makes anything she writes a pleasure to read. I don't know if this is her best novel, many critics think it is, but it is right up there, not only with her other works, but with anything from that period. And that period includes the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and her good friend Henry James.

One of the most alive, complex, maddening, and essentially terrifying antiheroes in literature. Personally very gratifying to come back to this after almost twenty years and feel it to be even more powerful than I remembered. Wharton's tone perfectly walks the razor-sharp line between high satire and tragic drama. Undine is an insatiable force of nature, a sort of steady catastrophe mindlessly destroying anything in its path. As real and wrenching as the stories of her victims are, they all pale somehow next to the spectacle of her audacious radiance, which, of course, once you fall into it, you realize is actually a black hole eating light.

Check out my analysis of Undine Spragg over on Booktube!

I've often said on Goodreads that I struggle with books where all the characters are unlikeable.

Sigh. My aging memory. Two of my favourite books are Vanity Fair & Forever Amber with two of the most ruthless women in fiction. (Both due for a reread)

So you can add Undine Spragg to the list, a small town girl who moves to New York to become one of the fashionable and marry well.

Unlike Becky & Amber, Undine does have money. Like Amber, she is fabulously beautiful

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but her main weapons are a ruthless nature & an inability to care about anyone but herself.

n  And he did not doubt that she would gain her end: he knew her violent desires and her cold tenacity.n

After some disappointing Wharton novels earlier this year & the end of last year (especially the Vance Weston duology) it is wonderful to be back to Wharton at her brilliant best. The writing, the character development is all top notch, & the part where we can see the lengths that Undine will go to to achieve her ends was genuinely chilling.

My best read of the year.

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