Custom of the Country

Undine Sprague is the most dangerous kind of beautiful: she wants everything, and she wants it now. Arriving in New York from Apex City with a blank smile and an insatiable hunger for status, she launches herself through society like a missile, leaving husbands discarded and reputations in ruins. Three marriages later, she has traded up from a hardware fortune to European nobility, yet still she is haunted by what she doesn't yet possess. Edith Wharton constructs this novel like a surgical instrument, cutting through the glittering surface of Gilded Age America to reveal the vacuum at its core. What makes Undine so unforgettably horrifying is her innocence of wrongdoing: she simply doesn't understand why she shouldn't have everything she wants. The novel operates as a ruthless anatomy of a particular American disease, the belief that happiness is a matter of acquisition, that people are stepping stones, that contentment is always one acquisition away. It is savage, funny, and deeply sad.