Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands: How to Do Business in Sixty Countries
This book is a classic Edith Wharton: exciting, enlivening, depressing, bitter, mean. It was written during her rather unpleasant divorce, which followed a rather unpleasant marriage, and it shows her disgust for social climbers and the multiply-divorced.
I simply could not put it down.
First of all, there's the heroine, Undine Spragg (for some reason, the Amazon review refers to her as Undine Sprague). She wants to be the center of everything, and feels it is her due. She captures the attention of a scion of an Old New York family. I'd say hilarity ensues, but that would only be true if you think a loveless marriage, infidelity, financial hanky-panky, lying, divorce, annulment, suicide, remarriage, more infidelity, and so on are hilarity. I'd avoid discussing it for fear of giving away the plot, but come on. It's Edith Wharton. You don't read Edith Wharton for the plot; you read it for the writing.
In the end, we see Undine, on her, um, fourth? marriage, with all the money she can ever want. You'd think it was an undeservedly happy ending for such an evil person, but Undine can never be happy if anybody is getting more attention than she. And we leave her as she is finding out that a man married to a divorcee cannot be an ambassador. It's a very Whartonian ending, for Undine's unfortunate end to be a life of luxury, but deprivation of the one thing she desires most.
# Posted by ayse