The Custom of the Country lacks two things that are normally considered prerequisites for a popular work of fiction: a sympathetic leading character whom a reader may identify with, and a clear moral center of consciousness by which the actions of the leading characters may be judged. The absence of these two elements may account for why the novel is a puzzling experience for many readers who bring certain expectations to it as a work of realistic fiction. These two missing elements may also account for the novel's success. Wharton is tackling much of the same territory as she did in The House of Mirth (1905; see separate entry), but in this novel she does not have a heroine who is ill-suited to a transitional society that has lost its moral center.

Rather she has an ambitious, amoral, conniving, emotionally unresponsive female protagonist who is oblivious to...