'Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country is one of the most enjoyable great novels ever written', says Margaret Drabble. You'd have to have read a number of great novels to judge of that, but I certainly enjoyed it enormously. Published in 1913, it apparently caused a bit of a furore, as it gives a pretty negative picture of the societies it depicts: in New York the rich, the nouveau riche and the old American aristocracy, and in France the aspiring expats and the old French aristocracy. Swimming at various stages in her life in all these pools, Undine Spragg is determined to be a big fish wherever she ends up.
The prime fact about Undine is that she is a stunning beauty, with her 'black brows, her reddish-tawny hair and the pure red and white of her complexion'. All her successes, of which there are many, are predicated on this. Born and raised in an unremarkable Midwestern town, she manages to persuade her newly wealthy father and mother to move to New York, where she hopes to snare a rich and important husband. Things don't go all that well at first - Undine is uneducated and incredibly naive, and her awkwardness at social events is painful. But she soon attracts the attention of Ralph Marvell. He is attractive enough to pass muster, and Undine is swayed by the fact that his family is an old and distinguished one. Unfortunately they are also poor, so Mr Spragg is persuaded to give his daughter an allowance to enable her to marry Ralph. The couple go to Europe for a protracted visit, but Undine is desperately bored by the churches and galleries they visit, and is extremely put out when their visit to Paris, where she finally feels at home, is cut short through lack of funds. Even worse, she discovers she's pregnant, and fact which reduces her to floods of tears, as she sits among the piles of new dresses she realises she won't be able to wear. 'It takes a year - a whole year out of life!... For all the good this rubbish will do me now! I loathe the very sight of it'.
Once little Paul is born, Undine can't wait to get back to France, which she does fairly soon, leaving the child in the care of his adoring father and grandparents. When Ralph is taken seriously ill, a cable is sent to Undine, but she has other things on her mind, and the first thing Ralph hears when he recovers is that Undine is on her way to Nevada to get a divorce. She expects to marry a wealthy man-about-town who happens to be currently married to Ralph's cousin, but he lets her down and she travels back to Paris to seek an alternative. Eventually she manages to snare a French aristocrat, but he is also poor and insists on spending most of the year in their ancient, dreary chateau deep in the French countryside. She'd like another divorce but his Catholicism puts that out of the question. Eventually she's free again and ends up with Elmer Moffatt, a man who was an important part of her life when she was a girl - he's as rich now as anyone could possibly wish, so Undine should be content. But we discover right at the end that she has one more desire, one that can never be fulfilled.
Undine is a brilliantly conceived character, a real anti-heroine along the lines of Becky Sharp or Scarlett O'Hara. It's hard to love her - her neglect of her little son is tragic, and her treatment of poor Ralph is shocking - but you can't help admiring her tenacity. She never really learns to fit into the society of New York which she's married into, and feels more at home among the social-climbing expats she meets in Paris, though she secretly despises most of them. When she ends up with her teenage sweetheart Elmer Moffatt she's finally found her true place, as he's the only person she knows who she can be truly herself with. He's a fascinating character in himself - in the early part of the novel he seems like a typical brash, rather vulgar businessman, and indeed he remains so in some ways. But with his stupendous wealth has come the ability to acquire beautiful works of art, and Elmer proves to have exquisite taste and a genuine love for everything in his collection. You could see Undine as just another beautiful collectable, but that's too superficial a view. Though maybe his appreciation of her beauty is an aspect of it, you get the feeling that he really cares for her despite having a clear-headed understanding of her faults.
There's a huge amount to enjoy in this tremendous novel. It's social satire, yes, but also it's also thought-provoking in its view of women's lives, of marriage, and of the easy availability of divorce. Sometimes it makes you laugh with a sort of admiring horror, but there's also tragedy - Ralph Marvell's eventual end, and little Paul's treatment by his mother, especially highlighted in the final chapter, in which he muses in confusion about his French father, who he loved, and his new American father who he hardly knows - and of course his mother, rarely present in his life at all.
It's many. years since I read anything else by Wharton - I think a re-read of The House of Mirth might be next on the list. But I suspect The Custom of the Country may be her masterpiece. Any Wharton fans out there? I'd be happy to have recommendations.
