The Custom of the Country (1913)

This is another dip into the Lifetime Reading Plan well.

Undine Spragg is a beautiful but spoiled little Midwestern bourgeois princess. She goads her parents into relocating to New York City, where she hopes to realize her dream of marrying well, entering "society" as she sees it, and living a life of ease and entertainment, surrounded by all the things lots and lots of money can buy.

A succession of marital adventures (each with an aristocrat of a different type) teach her nothing about living a truly fulfilling life. Undine is sort of a proto-Scarlett O'Hara. But unlike Scarlett, she never undergoes any refining hardship, and thus, never develops her character into someone the reader can truly like.

This is a didactic book, in which Wharton shows us how the prevailing definitions and behaviors of success in business create such "perfect monsters" as Undine. A perceptive mouthpiece of a character states this theme outright in the first third of the book. "The custom of the country" has created her. The remainder of the book merely hammers the lesson home over and over again. Although there are some surprises and reversals, Undine is allowed to remain the same spoiled Undine she was from the beginning. ( )

I liked that this book was set in New York and Edith Wharton was obviously very clever. But overall, I just didn’t dig this book much. There is something about the story of “vapid but beautiful jerk that always gets her way” that just doesn't do it for me. Snooze.

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Undine Spragg has come to New York to meet the people that you always read about and to become one of them. The book follows her from New York to Paris and back again. It gives a look at her desires and social climbing. Though not always pretty I felt sorry for Undine, primarily because she never realized what she was missing while hurting those around her. Some of the book surprised me in how carelessly Undine treated her family and husband. Even though I didn't like the main character I really liked the book. I liked the way the story unfolded and though there were things I guessed at I wasn't entirely sure what would happen to Undine until the end. ( )