About this title: THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY marks Edith Wharton's return to the satiric tone of THE HOUSE OF MIRTH. She follows bored, passive Ralph Marvell, a gentle young man with the heart of a poet, as he squanders his family's modest inheritance in an attempt to find happiness. But the real star of Wharton's narrative is the beautiful, ambitious, and blatantly amoral schemer, Undine Spragg, who manipulates her nouveau-riche Midwestern parents into taking her East. There she rampages through New York society in search of a wealthy husband--who turns out, disastrously, to be Ralph Marvell. Wharton savages ...
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Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Signet Classics, Bergenfield, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1989
ISBN-13:9780451523679ISBN:0451523679
Description: Good. 0451523679 Mass market paperback, previously read used book in good condition, varying degrees of shelf wear, some spine creases, m..._ read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Date Published: 1975
ISBN-13:9780684719269ISBN:0684719266
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Corners curled and creased. Text unmarked. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Scribner Library of Contemporary Classics, 1. Audience: General/trade. 603 pages. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Date Published: 1985
ISBN-13:9780684719269ISBN:0684719266
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. A little yellowing but no marks. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Scribner Library of Contemporary Classics, 1. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Signet Classics
Date Published: 1989
ISBN-13:9780451523679ISBN:0451523679
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. minor wear to cover. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 372 p. Signet Classics (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Berkley
Date Published: 1981
ISBN-13:9780425046081ISBN:0425046087
Description: Acceptable. MAY HAVE COVER WEAR, SPINE CREASES, HIGHLIGHTING, UNDERLINING & PAGES YELLOWED FROM AGE. FASTER SERVICE FROM US! ! ! read more
"Wharton's sobering saga of social ambition drives home the point that we should be careful what we wish for. Her anti-heroine, Undine, is staggeringly vain and ambitious and struggles when she is on the outside of society looking in. But, unfortunately, she feels even more dissatisfied when she achieves her objective to marry well and is imprisioned by the societal norms of her husband's very gentile, blue-blooded family.
The Gilded Age society that Wharton presents to us is really a brave new world for both the nouveau riche financiers and industrialists as well as the denizens of the quiet, more established social world. The clash of money and refinement makes this novel both compelling and revolting as we watch the symbiatic relationship between the old and new.
There are precious few sympathetic characters in the book; and,knowing that Wharton wrote about the world she inhabited makes her morality tale all the more sobering to me. One interesting facet is that the two most genuine characters in the book come from opposite sides of the spectrum: one is a brash, self-made man who epitomizes ambition and new money---and the other, a French aristocrat who values family heritage and position far more than material wealth. Undine got to choose. . . ."
"Our dear Miss Wharton creates a perfectly unrepentant, narcissistic anti-heroine in Custom of the Country. Undine Spragg's father rises from social and economic obscurity to wealth, and during that rise creates a daughter who has the utterly fantastic ability to get whatever she wants, only to be wretchedly dissatisfied after her desires are met. Undine's blindness to the fact that she ruins the lives of everyone around her while on this path of dissatisfaction is staggering - hence the narcissism. But it's an uncertain self-love, as she desperately tries to fit into whatever society she perceives to be better-off than her current circle. She reminds me of what an ignoble version of House of Mirth's Lily Bart would be if Bart got everything she wanted (which, of course, she does not). I won't ruin the ending here, but suffice to say, Undine never learns from her past mistakes and makes everyone else around her miserable, while being mostly miserable herself. It's Wharton, so of course the book is expertly written, but the characters' downfalls are pretty painful to read..."
"I loved this book. I approached it with some trepidation but with no good reason. Edith Wharton's style is very readable, interesting, modern and above all, funny. Not to say that this is a comic novel but it is a satire on turn of the century American society, with lessons still to be learnt for today.
Undine Spragg (and isn't that a wonderful name!) is a gloriously awful selfish monster. Beautiful, stupid, uneducated, ambitious. A real "grass is always greener" type who will let nothing - not husbands, not her son, not her parents - stand in her way on to being amongst the best people, with the best stuff. A WAG of the late 19th century as one reader in our group put it.
There is depth here too. The clashes between the old world French and new world Americans are beautifully described. The male characters in particular come off quite well and much sympathy is reserved for Ralph Marvell and Undine's son, Paul. But at the same time it can't be avoided that Undine is a product of a society which fails to educate and include its women in the intellectual business world that exists and then is shocked when the women behave in a stupid, selfish and unheeding way. And the men may be sympathetic but they are also fools for falling for a shallow beauty and then expecting more depth and understanding.
A brilliant book. I shall definitely read more Wharton."
"In "Custom of the Country," Wharton follows the entry (and exit and re-entry ad infinitum) of the midwestern beauty Undine Spragg into New York's high society circa 1900. About 40% into this book, things start to come to a head between Undine Spragg (our anti-heroine) and her poor husband, Ralph. At that point I almost tossed the book out as I couldn't bear the prospect of the spendthrift and shallow Undine making his life miserably for another couple of hundred pages. Without spoiling the plot, let's just say it doesn't happen that way - at just the point where I started wearying of Undine things get surprising, deeper, and more complex.
A few scenes in particular made my estimation of Wharton's skill as writer shoot up (I had not read much of her before): the scene when Ralph decides how to respond to Undine's most egregious demand was as startling as a gunshot; the flashback scene where an old beau of Undine's back in the Midwest gets drunk and tells off the local societry matrons is funny as hell; and the scene at the end where her young son Paul waits plaintively for her to return from some extended vacation is sad, sad, sad. It's surprising we don't hear of this novel more often."
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