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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780143039709
ISBN: 0143039709
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 368
Publication Date: 2006-05-30
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Studio: Penguin Classics

Wharton’s glittering satire of the newly affluent in Old New York

Considered by many to be her masterpiece, Edith Wharton’s second full-length work is a scathing yet personal examination of the exploits and follies of the modern upper class. As she unfolds the story of Undine Spragg, from New York to Europe, Wharton affords us a detailed glimpse of what might be called the interior décor of this America and its nouveau riche fringes. Through a heroine who is as vain, spoiled, and selfish as she is irresistibly fascinating, and through a most intricate and satisfying plot that follows Undine’s marriages and affairs, she conveys a vision of social behavior that is both supremely informed and supremely disenchanted. BACKCOVER: “As long as men and women seek to use each other—and to use each other badly—Edith Wharton can be counted upon to provide the ideal commentary.”
—Anita Brookner

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A personal response to Wharton's characters
Review: I hope to report only subjective responses to this novel, After Ethan Frome the only Wharton I've ever read. And having got through this one, I shan't be tempted to take on any more of her work. I leave it only puzzled as to why she is a major figure in the history of American letters.

I disliked all of her characters. They are thin, stereotypical representatives of time, place and behavior, and Undine -the central character - is the worst. Her frail and uxorious husband, Marvell, [the ironic names given to people and places are redpaint obvious] had no better future than suicide, although facing his problems directly would have resolved them. Apart from the acquisitive Elmer Moffat none of the major characters even sensed a moral imperative and Elmer's morality is limited to relationships.

I wanted to put the book down early in Book I but slogged on thinking at first it must be satiric then realizing it isn't satire at all but a realistic attempt to portray characters typical of the preWWI world Wharton knew so well. And I've no doubt her's is an honest portrayal of that world. Yet, I grew so grouchy when reading my wife said I ought stop reading it. My mood grew darker with every page. Undine is the most odious female character I can remember ever reading .

I do credit Wharton for her felicitous prose style and her narrative structure because nothing else kept me turning pages. Yet even the narrative is melodrama at best.

Surely I've overlooked important issues and have revealed more about me than about Edith. As they say in theatre, not everybody can be part of your audience.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Relentlessly Modern Masterpiece
Review: The unsympathetic protagonist is still a tough sell in literature. You can't admire Lolita without mentioning your dislike of Humbert. A discussion of A Confederacy of Dunces-comic as it is- is incomplete without mention of the creepy neurosis of Ignatius Reilly, and so on. For the unlikeable protag to be a woman is a virtual invitation to have your book ignored or disparaged on that account alone.

So Wharton's decision to put the amoral Undine Spragg at the center of The Custom of the Country was bold.Spragg bullies her parents into moving to New York from Kansas because she senses that the city is the center of the world that she wants to conquer. Wharton's treatment of the character and her perceptions is splendidly ironic. When Spragg is invited to a posh dinner, she is disappointed to note that the fire in the grate isn't a gas log or an electric light, but an old-fashioned wood fire.

It is because Spragg is, unlike Wharton, devoid of any introspection or sense of right and wrong that we have to read this as a deadpan piece of satire. Wharton's prose is wonderful and although this book is not read much these days, she considered it her masterpiece.


--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and
bang BANG: A Novel

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A Victorian Paris Hilton
Review: The main character Undine is focused on having the best, most expensive clothing, furniture, jewelry and whatever else she can get her hands on no matter the cost, financially or otherwise on those around her who are forced to support her. Undine has an intense need to know all the important people when they are in style or just when it suits her interests to know them. These traits may remind you of some of the famous socialities today who are famous for almost no other reason than they are famous. Undine does nothing more than talk her way into money, which along with her beauty is her sole talent.

Undine does many things that may make the reader uncomfortable, and although I hesitate to label her as bad, she has a lot of attitude and total disregard for others. Her conquests create an engaging narrative fueled by her selfish personality. She takes advantage of people who love her - parents, men, other family - in a cold, calculating way that seems devoid of passion, except for one early affair that we only hear about after the fact.

One of Wharton's major points in this novel is if you have a society where women's place is not college or business, or some other trade that allows them to fend for themselves, they have few choices in life. Creatures like Undine can emerge in this environment. Her choices in life are similar to cut-throat business practices like that which the men around her do and even her father is involved in.

Although I have read Wharton's major novels, this an exceptional one because of the spectacular character of Undine and the quality of writing. Hard to put down.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Among Wharton's best
Review: In The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton creates one of the most unlikable, even despicable, characters I know of in American fiction. Undine Spragg is not a murderer, sociopath, or monster, but an ambitious young woman determined to climb New York's social ladder to the very top. The ambitions in themselves are not inherently bad, and other characters clearly share them. It is Undine's utter lack of regard for anyone else, from her aging parents to her neglected son, that makes her contemptible. What makes her chilling is the odd combination of ingenuousness and its opposite; with rare exceptions she is oblivious to the rights, aspirations, and feelings of others if they do not pertain to her own objectives.

In Wharton's world, choosing the right man was as important to a society woman's future as selecting the right college, graduate school, or first job is today for a professional woman. For Undine and her friends, divorce carries no more significance than as a means to get out of the wrong job. As she tells her fiancé's shocked traditional New York family, "I guess Mabel'll get a divorce pretty soon . . . They like each other well enough. But he's been a disappointment to her . . . Mabel realizes she'll never really get anywhere till she gets rid of him." This dinner conversation foreshadows the rest of the novel.

Wharton reveals Undine's competitive nature through her childhood rivalry with Indiana Frusk, and her unsatisfied, reaching one through her travels with her parents. Undine will never be happy because there will always be someone with something she doesn't have, whether it is greater wealth, fame, or a title or position.

By marrying Undine, Ralph hopes to save her from "Van Degenism," which helps to set up the irony after irony found throughout The Custom of the Country. Ralph doesn't know that Undine not only desires "Van Degenism," but she wants to define it. A would-be poet, Ralph cannot seem to separate surface beauty from inner ugliness. "When she shone on him like that what did it matter what nonsense she talked?" Raymond de Chelles, who reminds Undine of Ralph, first sees her on an evening when, as even the cynical Charles Bowen thinks, " . . . she seemed to have been brushed by the wing of poetry, and its shadow lingered in her eyes."

More than greed, selfishness, or hedonism, Undine's defining characteristic, lack of empathy, shapes her actions. "It never occurred to her that other people's lives went on when they were our of her range of vision." What dooms her relationships with Ralph and Raymond is not money, attention, socializing, or any of Undine's numerous desires and complaints, nor is it simply the gulf between their values and her own. The failure lies in her inability to grasp that anything of importance exists outside her own system and their inability to see this in her until far too late. Because her parents cannot deny her anything, ". . . her sense of the rightfulness of her own cause had been measured by making people do as she pleased."

Undine wants everything, but especially that which she does not have. Her counterpart, Elmer Moffatt, exhibits this "new money" behavior through collecting objects. "To have things had always seemed to her the first essential of existence," while Moffatt says, "I mean to have the best, you know; not just to get ahead of the other fellows, but because I know it when I see it." Raymond's tapestries have no more deeper emotional value to Moffatt than last year's dresses do to Undine; all are markers of money and success.

Ironically, Undine is little more than an attractive object to the people around her. As Madame de Trézac tells her, " . . . they're delighted to bring you out at their big dinners, with the Sèvres and the plate." Later, when she visits dealers with Moffatt, she saw that "the actual touching of rare textures--bronze or marble, or velvets flushed with the bloom of age--gave him a sensations like her own beauty had once roused in him." To Moffatt, who knows and understands her insatiable hungers, she may be at least in part an object for his collection. He tells her, "You're not the beauty you were . . . but you're a lot more fetching." The "oddly qualified phrase" could be used of Raymond's tapestries and many of the other old valuables that Moffatt has acquired.

For Wharton, Undine and Moffatt represent those aspects of contemporary American society that she most disliked. As Charles Bowen says, " . . . in this country, the passion for making money has preceded the knowing how to spend it . . ." Undine, like the Wall Street of Peter Van Degen and Elmer Moffatt, is voracious, self-centered, reaching, and without conscience or moral center (choosing to sell an ill-gotten string of pearls for the money rather than to return it). Unlike Mrs. Marvell, with her hospital committee activities, Undine does not contribute to society; she was born to take. Symbolic and symptomatic of the new America that Wharton left, Undine remains ignorant and without taste.

Wharton's last paragraph is brilliant, for it cleverly shows how even an Undine who has achieved wealth, position, fame, and power can still find something to desire--something that she has put out of her own reach through her actions. " . . . . she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for." Undine is a young woman; Wharton hints at the potential she still has to leave yet more misery in her wake as she yearns for yet more of what she believes she deserves. She is like a living Tantalus, but one whose every attempt to grasp destroys.

Diane L. Schirf
Sunday, 6 May 2007.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Savage customs
Review: Few social climbers are as surreally despicable as Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg, who doesn't care what happens to anyone else as long as she can shop and party. And "The Custom of the Country" is the perfect example of what such people do to the people around them. It's nauseating and brilliant, all at once.

Undine Spragg is a mesmerizing beauty from a tiny town, whose parents made a small-scale fortune and have moved to the glitzy world of New York. Undine wants the best of everything, more than her family can afford, but she thinks it's all worth it -- so she marries a besotted son of "old New York," but it doesn't take long for him to realize how incompatible they are.

And he doesn't realize that Undine is hiding a (then) shameful secret -- she was once married and quickly divorced from a vulgar businessman. In the present, Undine continues her quest for a life of pleasure, moving on to a French nobleman and getting just as dissatisfied with him. The only way to succeed lies in the one man who sees her for what she is.

Undine Spragg may actually be one of the most despicable, selfish characters in all of classic literature -- she literally doesn't care about anyone but herself, or who she hurts. You'd think a book about someone like that would be dreary, but instead it's one long needle at the people like Undine, who care only for money, status and fun.

But it's also about the changing fortunes in late 19th-century America (and Europe). New money -- symbolized by Undine and her shrewd, megarich ex-hubby -- was squeezing out the old guard, who were never terribly rich to start with. Wharton's observations on their rise and decline have a sharp, biting edge. Although compared to the anti-heroine, the old traditions seem pretty innocent.

Lots of celebrity socialites could take a lesson from Undine's story: she's a snob of humble stock, thinks she's a great person, and utterly selfish -- if her husband shoots himself, that's great! She can marry again without the disgrace of a divorce! Yet in the end, you know that Undine will always be craving something more that she thinks will make her happy, but she will never find it.

The characters around Undine are usually nice, but blinded by her nymphlike beauty -- and even her parents, who know what she's like, are too beaten-down by her whining to resist. Only her ex-husband, Ralph Marvell, is really right for her -- not only is he obscenely rich and just as grasping as Undine, but he's smart enough to know what a monster she is.

"The Custom of the Country" is a wickedly barbed, brilliant piece of work, with one of the nastiest anti-heroines ever, and a great look at the rising tides of "new money." A must-read.

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