FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile
Laurel Lefkow gives a stellar performance as she introduces Edith Wharton's 1913 characters to a 21st-century audience. The story features one of literature's least likable heroines, Undine Spragg. Lefkow gives her a simpering, cloying, sometimes whiny voice, which is perfectly suited to this shallow, spoiled, and self-absorbed young woman. Undine has four marriages as she ascends the social ladder, and each union is masterfully portrayed. Undine's richest husband is the crude financial tycoon Elmer Moffat. He is given a husky, folksy voice. The story is slow paced and filled with richly detailed locales. Lefkow’s warm, articulate voice makes for a highly enjoyable listening experience. D.L.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Elizabeth Hardwick
Edith Wharton's finest achievement.
From the Publisher
Praise for Edith Wharton and Custom of the Country
“For my money, no literary antiheroine can best Undine... Wharton’s portrait of [her] is so acute that it frequently flickers across time into the contemporary.”—Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
“Prescient... In this new Gilded Age, when the disparities between rich and poor are again, and disastrously, as great as they were in Wharton’s time, we could do with such a novelist, a cultural anthropologist who might hold up a mirror to our failings and our future, with eagle-eyed clarity and a small measure of compassion.”—Claire Messud, The New York Times Style Magazine
“There are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as ‘major,’ and Edith Wharton is one.”—Gore Vidal
“Wharton is an amusingly ruthless observer of the manners and mores of the wealthy.”—Jay McInerney, The Week
The Guardian (London)
The Custom of the Country is one of the most enjoyable great novels ever written. Not all enjoyable novels are great, and not all great novels are enjoyable. This is, supremely, both.”
Saturday Review (London)
Brilliantly written.”
Bookman
A splendid and memorable piece of work.”
Forbes (audio review)
Of all Edith Wharton novels, The Custom of the Country is my absolute favorite…Grace Conlin’s reading of Blackstone’s unabridged version is splendid, her voice fruity, elegant, and utterly ruthless.”
Donna Campbell Washington State University
"The Custom of the Country satirizes much that Wharton thought was wrong with the US at the turn of the century: serial divorce, rampant consumerism and materialism, indifference to art and literature, and a proudly provincial attitude toward the traditions of Old New York and European culture. Combined with Sarah Emsley's incisive and well-researched introduction and notes, this excellent new edition of the novel includes well-chosen readings ranging from selections by Charles Darwin and Thorstein Veblen to excerpts from novels by Harold Frederic and Anita Loos that shed light on Wharton's audacious protagonist, Undine Spragg. The result is a volume that not only restores the social and economic contexts for the novel but sharpens the reader's appreciation for Wharton's satire in this book, the most savage–and the most humorous–novel of her long career."
Robin Peel University of Plymouth
This is an excellent edition of what I consider to be Wharton's best novel, and it is supported by very valuable supporting material. Arguing that the novel is a satire of consumerism, Sarah Emsley offers a particularly good analysis of Raymond de Chelles as one of the few positive forces, and a husband who acts as a counter to the rampant material ambitions which dominate other parts of the novel. Emsley's introduction also provides a succinct and successful summary of Wharton's life and a good survey of the relevant criticism. The edition ends with a series of extremely useful appendices, including Wharton's outline for the novel, examples of contemporary reviews, extracts from Darwin, Veblen and Santayana and sections on Aestheticism and Women and Marriage."
FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile
Laurel Lefkow gives a stellar performance as she introduces Edith Wharton's 1913 characters to a 21st-century audience. The story features one of literature's least likable heroines, Undine Spragg. Lefkow gives her a simpering, cloying, sometimes whiny voice, which is perfectly suited to this shallow, spoiled, and self-absorbed young woman. Undine has four marriages as she ascends the social ladder, and each union is masterfully portrayed. Undine's richest husband is the crude financial tycoon Elmer Moffat. He is given a husky, folksy voice. The story is slow paced and filled with richly detailed locales. Lefkow’s warm, articulate voice makes for a highly enjoyable listening experience. D.L.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine