The Custom of the Country (Penguin Classics)
by Edith Wharton
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Book Summary Information
Author: Edith WhartonEditor: Linda Wagner-Martin
Introduction: Linda Wagner-Martin
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-05-30
ISBN: 0143039709
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Book Reviews of The Custom of the Country (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: Age of Not-So-Innocent
Summary: 5 Stars
Undine Spragg is considered to be one of literature's most disturbingly evil characters. No doubt, Wharton could create the most dastardly of female villains--consider Bertha in "House of Mirth." This novel, an earlier one than "Age of Innocence" but later than "House of Mirth" is absolutely a masterpiece and I was stunned to realize I had not read this great American novel. I was pretty sure before that Edith Wharton was my favorite American author, now I'm certain. This is brilliance.
The story follows the young, spoiled, Midwestern beauty Undine from her embarrassing first moments assailing sophisticated New York society to her tainted conquests of society in France and finally New York again in the last moments of the golden age just prior to World War I (which so many authors, Thomas Mann and Colette tell us was the absolute end of a fairy-tale like era.) Wharton shows us the era on the cusp of change; motor cars are commonplace and broughams and landaus "lumbering"--telephones, elevators and subways are woven completely into New York life, heralding the 20th Century's revolutionary changes to come. Undine is as beautiful, captivating and cold as the soulless water nymph she is NOT named after--here, a delightful bit of Wharton's irony--THIS Undine is named after a patent hair product created by an enterprising grandparent.
Undine is clever in focusing on what she needs and wants, though completely uneducated and resistant to literature, arts and any science that does not immediately gratify her wishes. She is the PERFECT portrait of a "borderline personality disorder" who uses and abuses people as a means to her satisfaction, and who is constantly coveting the next, better thing that someone else has. She destroys her husband (a model for the later Newland Archer) and nearly destroys a few other people in her quest for celebrity, unbridled spending and having everything her way. The episodes in the book could come right out of "Dr. Laura"--parents fearful of their own child and giving in to their every whim, neglected and abandoned children used as pawns in divorce, lying, deception, retail therapy gone wild, serial divorce and general destruction of the institution of family values.
Undine matures only in her ability to "go slow", as Mrs. Heeny puts it, or to delay her gratification by making at least a few chess moves ahead on the board of her self-absorbed game. Her ability to blame others, never herself and to lay destruction in her path is a thread that never varies in the novel's unfolding.
The interesting thing is that Wharton, far from burning the seed corn of her bank of ideas, is astonishingly economical and uses all her characters in her novels over and over again, re-costuming them on her play stage and recycling the scenery. Undine has elements of Bertha (House of Mirth) and is the "anti-Ellen-Olenska (an exact opposite.) She has some of May Archer's stolid stupidity but surprising insight when it deals with her own survival. She has Lily Bart's heedlessness and willfulness. Elmer Moffatt, her foil and match, can be recognized in Beaufort from "Age of Innocence." It's fascinating to watch the similar characters appear in a new drama on Wharton's stage, and she is not only a master at drama but also a keen sociologist and anthropologist. We peep into French nobility, New York society and the demi-monde, all drawn with her exquisite sense of customs and mores.
If you love "Age of Innocence" and "House of Mirth" you can't help but love this novel. I'm not sure if it isn't her greatest--and it is almost on a par with Eliot's earlier "Middlemarch"--of which Virginia Woolff said was "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." "The Custom of the Country" was not only written for grown-up people, but is as fresh and modern and as filled with the same dilemmas people face today as in 1913.
Summary of The Custom of the Country (Penguin Classics)
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.
- This new edition features a new introduction and explanatory notes and reset text
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