n  "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."n

"we live in a society"
edith wharton: we sure the fuck do!!

Edith Wharton understood a certain type of woman as well or better than anyone who ever wrote a book. Undine was narcissistic, beautiful, manipulative, clever (but not overly intelligent or curious), and, above all, ambitious. She was more ruthless and eviscerating than a mafia don.

Eventually, one of her captivated followers might notice her complete lack of concern for anyone but herself and her lack of interest in anything other than shopping or dining. Some even began to find her boring, but as a reader I was never bored by her. She was a fascinating piece of work and the book is absolutely wonderful.

Edith Wharton was such a brilliant writer. What a book! I'm still digesting everything and need to think a bit before writing a real review, but for now I'll say that I enjoyed this greatly and found the (anti-) heroine Undine Spragg to be one of the most horrid, unlikable, and yet fascinating characters I've ever read about. Five big stars.

I very much enjoyed this story of Undine Spragg who, in 1867 wants more. The reader goes along for the ride as Undine tries to work her way up the social ladder thinking each new step will make her happier. And guess what -- well... you know the answer ;)
And if you're familiar at all with Edith Wharton, you know there's always a little twist in the end, and this one was in the very last sentence! I'm glad I finally got to this one.

Admittedly not the quality of The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth or Ethan Frome, however another splendid novel by Edith Wharton giving a glimpse into yesteryear ( written in 1913) with all the complications, outdated rules, customs, manners and hypocrisies intact. A spoiled young lady with unbelievable beauty asks and receives everything she desires from her constantly harassed middle class parents, accommodating Abner Spragg, a small town financier in the Midwest and loyal wife Leota. Nothing is sufficient for the endless demands from their only child Undine , new dresses, hats, shoes but why no pearls? Bored, feeling trapped in a quiet place she looks for excitement in the fictional town of Apex, the parents are afraid of their daughter's wrath, but the burg's amusing diversions are woefully lacking...
Still never satisfied forcing the haggard family to relocate to far off New York City, the center of the universe where the 400 live. Nevertheless the society there doesn't embrace newcomers and some insiders aren't rich either but have an illustrious name yet little more. Like Ralph Marvell handsome but weak, brought up to be a gentleman thus needs the family to support him, as his job being a lawyer is little better than smoke and mirrors. Falls madly in love at first sight with the gorgeous Undine (who wouldn't) still she hides peccadilloes from the past and he has no money ... problems, problems ensue. Honeymoons in Europe on other people's dime, the inevitable happens, the jaded one looks around, the fading aristocracy seems promising. And what about Elmer Moffat the scandalous Wall Street investor and his strange relationship with Undine, a soap opera in the making. The century old book is always interesting to visit these people from a planet that is ours, yet not quite. For readers that enjoy the stimulation of humans who seem silly but think about it, in the 22nd century how weird will we appear to them...I think not too well indeed.

Scarlett O'Hara worthy!

I didn't want to enjoy the nasty manipulations, the thoroughly narcissistic preoccupation with self at the sacrifice of others, and the vanity of the beautiful Undine, but I did! Thoroughly entertaining. A few surprises in the plot twists although the characters remained solidly who they are, as Maya Angelou said...

Poor Ralph.

Poor Paul.

Everyone who comes into contact with Undine Spragg ends up regretting it. She pulls them in with her beauty and appearance of innocence, but this girl knows what she is doing - if only she could figure out what she wants. Constantly striving for whatever it is she doesn't have, Undine has a sense of entitlement that knows no bounds. If her parents can't provide it, then she must need a husband. If he is incapable, well, she'll find a lover who can meet her bills. She seems to feel no remorse for those she tramples in her quest to get . . . . well, she's not completely sure where.

I know that this novel is Wharton's big hit, but I honestly enjoyed others more, especially Age of Innocence, House of Mirth, and Ethan Frome. This novel is conspicuously missing the big surprise ending that haunts the reader long after finishing her other works. While not my favorite, this is still a very worthwhile read as anything by Wharton is beautifully written and thought provoking.

Edith Wharton has fixed Henry James, whose essential problem is that he's a pain in the ass. He's smart and all, if that's what you're into, but he's never been known to end a sentence and he has this perverse refusal to write the interesting parts of stories. It's weird, right? It's like if the Death Star blew up off screen and the movie ended with people discussing it. "That was crazy how that just blew right up, huh?" "Yeah, at first I thought we weren't going to win, but in the end we did!" Edith Wharton is like Henry James with the interesting parts.

Custom of the Country follows Wharton's best character, especially if you like terrible characters: Undine Spragg, the Edmund Hillary of social climbing. She arrives in New York from the allegorical Midwestern small town of Apex, with money on her mind. "To have things had always seemed to her the first essential of existence." She's out to use her beauty to become one of the beautiful people.

She's a social genius: brilliant at reading people, seeing what they really want, adapting her behavior to them. But she's desperately shallow - "a mote in the beam of pleasure" - and that's her hamartia. (That's a fancy word I just learned; it means fatal flaw.) If what they want is to talk about art or literature, she's bright enough to know it but in no way interested in doing it.

So she goes through social circles, partners, cities. "She was always doubling and twisting on herself." She marries the hidden sea cave Ralph Marvell, a sensitive artist type with social stature but no money. She dumps him for Peter Van Degen, who has the money but no intention of divorcing his wife; she rebounds with the French aristocrat Raymond de Chelles, who makes her a marquise but will not fund her partygoing. And she ends up with who she started with, the crude, ambitious, successful Elmer Moffat. Her big secret all along has been that she capriciously married him back in Apex, in sortof a Britney Spears-in-Vegas move. In a bizarrely touching way, Moffat has loved her all along; he's pulled strings, sometimes cruelly, to keep her afloat and within reach. You find yourself almost happy for her with this match; they're perfect for each other, both entirely untroubled by morals or empathy. But even at the end, with all the money and social standing she's ever wanted, she's already grasping for the next rung of the social ladder. "She could never be an Ambassador's wife," thanks to her divorces, and in the very last sentence of the book, "she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for." "She had everything she wanted," Wharton tells us, "But she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them."

Much of this is very funny, and much more of it is very sad. Undine (pronounced, probably, UNdeen) is yet another in the long, long line of literature's shitty mothers. She forgets poor Paul's birthday, leaving him sitting in his nursery waiting to be taken to his own party. At one point she blackmails her husband with a threat to pretend to love her son. She demands $100,000 (to buy an annulment) or she'll take custody of him, despite having no interest whatsoever in him. The scheme drives Ralph Marvell to suicide. This plan was suggested by Elmer Moffat, in the most consequential example of his machinations. She is truly a piece of shit person, which didn't at all stop me from rooting for her.

Much of this book is about divorce, and what it means for a woman; and indeed Edith Wharton wrote it as she went through her own, devastating divorce. It was a painful one, from a philandering and profligate husband - and not the only time Wharton would swap the genders while telling a story - and she never recovered from it; her social standing was permanently damaged. Instead of remarrying, at age 50, she focused on writing novels.

So we should thank her lame husband, because if he were any better, she might never have fixed Henry James. Here's what James's psychological acuity and insight into human motivation looks like when it's engaged by someone who knows how to finish a sentence, and how to write the exciting parts. Edith Wharton was deeply influenced by him - this book is a direct, if crooked, response to his aching Washington Square - but she's better than him. I love this judgment from Edmund White: "Even in the best of Wharton, I’d hazard, there is always something slightly trashy...as though Henry James and Wilkie Collins were always struggling over her soul." Yes, that's as good a way to say it as any. She ends up combining the best of both of them into something that's better than either. She is a marvel.

Undine Spragg is a woman as ridiculous as her name. The word that comes to mind about her interior life is: hunger. She has no peace, but is always on a fevered hunt for the next thing she is convinced will bring her lasting happiness, no matter how many people she drags down in the attempt.

There's a great podcast series by Sister Anna Marie McGuan called Cultivating the Interior Life. At one point she discusses the various egos we give our attention to: the social ego, the intellectual ego etc. And how as long as our lives revolve around those exterior identities, we'll never have peace. True peace is something only found in the inner heart--the place where God lives in us. Undine Spragg is solidly locked out of her inner heart and has built her life totally in reference to her social ego. Anytime a twinge of conscience creeps up, she brushes it aside or concocts a narrative to deceive herself.

I began this novel wanting to see her get her comeuppance or have a radical change of heart. I didn't get either, but then Undie doesn't really get what she wants either, and she never will. And there's a kind of poetic justice to that.

4'5

“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 …”

This is the story of Undine Spragg, a stunning beauty from a wealthy Midwestern US family in the early 1900’s. She convinces her family to leave home and seek the money and status she feels she deserves in New York, obtains it, and then wants more.

Edith Wharton created a unique protagonist in Undine. Readers will dislike her from the beginning, but unlike some other wonderful bad girls of fiction, her badness doesn’t grow in complexity as she develops. Undine doesn’t develop. She’s the same at the end as she is at the beginning: unsatisfied.

The story revolves around Undine, but I found her the most boring character--to the point where I had trouble getting through this novel. She uses everyone in her life to get what she thinks she deserves, with absolutely no remorse. I was interested in all the people around her: her parents, her husbands, her son. Wharton writes so beautifully about these other characters--even breaking my heart a few times with the intensity of her descriptions. But they were always left behind (sometimes tragically), and forgotten; discarded and left as detritus, both by Undine and frankly by Wharton, for the story of Undine’s boring and endless desire for more.

So what is the point? Possibly the key is in this scene:

n  “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.”n

Homo sapiens Americanus. Wharton seems to blame the mind-numbing boredom that society women experienced and embodied on what she saw as a particularly American phenomenon: that women were left out of anything interesting. Undine realizes at one point living in Paris that women there “kept up,” with art and culture and business, whereas Undine was lost in those conversations. She has an epiphany finally that she was not only bored, but boring.

It seems this problem is still with us, and isn’t only affecting women, or Americans (though it is epidemic here). Perhaps if everyone was taught to take an interest in the world, and allowed to be heard and to impact the conversation, there wouldn’t be as many boring characters like Undine in our society, endlessly striving for more things to fill their empty existence.

What a satire. The heroine is a wannabe member of the US upper class who comes across as shallow, selfish, immune to others. Luckily she is beautiful and is able to snare a husband. He was not good enough, so go to Europe and remarry and this time get a title. But France is not the US so back to the US and try again. She is a horrible person with no interest other than to get whatever she hasn't already got.