The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A very enjoyable read. Undine moved up through various social circles with ambition, a keen sense of social awareness, and plenty of lying in order to get her way despite seemingly insurmountable challenges. Moffat, her first fling as a teenager in the midwest, also moved up in the world to become a NY stock market billionaire, also with ambition, but with a clear sense of truth and honor. It seems a bit strange that these two would marry (twice!), given one was so honest and the other wasn't, but I suppose they shared other similarities in their ambition and love of the things that money can buy. It is ironic that, in between her marriages to Moffat, despite the fact that she was completely uninterested in anything except socializing, that she married more nerdy and conservative men without much money (twice!). Money (financial capital) did not really matter to Undine though. The dresses and jewelry, and indeed even the husbands, were not in and of themselves interesting to her. She really only wanted the social standing that she could only achieve by virtue of having these things. Somehow though, despite her being such an unsympathetic antihero in so many ways, I could not help but share her happiness at the end.

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