Separating good fiction from great : Wharton's novels

Yes I am liking Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country - it's fun and sharp-eyed, a period piece (even in its day - as noted in yesterday's post, part of the power of this novel is its recognition that it's chronicling a society already in eclipse - it's the tragedy of the protag., Undine Spragg Marvell, that she realizes this too late), gossip, full of plot elements - would make a good TV mini-series no doubt and maybe has done so already- and it's full of Wharton gems of phrasing (which would inevitably get lost in a screen adaptation), and I wish I had a copy next to me so I could quote some, maybe in a future post - but, all that said, it's clearly not as accessible or popular a novel as her two great works, House of Mirth and Age of Innocence (Ethan Frome, a third, is sui generis) - and I think here's why: one way or another, we need to identify with and "root for" the lead characters in a novel, whatever their flaws or foibles - whether it's a truly odd but in many ways pitiable character like, say, Dostoyevsky's underground man, or, more typically, an ambitious hero/heroine trying to rise in class or stature or at least gain social acceptance - we may not envy them, we may not even like them, but we can understand them and hope that they can learn and grow over the course of a novel, become better, achieve their goal, or at the least survive. Compare Lily Bart in Mirth with Undine Spragg in Custom and you'll see what I mean: Undine is a completely narcissistic and shallow person; she's about to ruin her doting sad sack of a husband financially, and if she crashes in flames we don't really care - she's despicable; Lily Bart is a social climber for sure and, like Undine, she makes a bad deal with a guy who's interested in her and puts herself at his mercy and in the process destroys her social reputation - but it's all very complicated; we hope she can get out from under him, and then there's the oddity of his (Jewish) outsider status as well - whereas Undine and the deal she makes with her old nemesis from back home in Apex? There's not even the slightest chance that this will turn out well for her, nor do we care if it does: in other words the plot of Custom, though engaging in many ways, is more tendentious, and lacking in the ambiguities that separate good from great fiction.