So Whartonian, so Jamesian: The Custom of the Country

So Whartonian, so Jamesian - I'm only three or four chpaters into Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country (1913), one of her lesser-knowns, but already it's unmistakably hers channeled through H. James, but with perhaps a bit more of a focus on match-making, mostly from the female POV - this novel starts in a Manhattan hotel where a midwestern (?- from an indeterminate city called something like Apex, maybe it's Chicago or Pittsburgh) has come to NYC to find the right social connections from 18ish daughter, odd name like Undine? They've been there 2 years but have never quite struck the right notes, though daughter and mother have almost an anthropologist's interest in the social order and the right families: despite that, daughter misses the clues and cues - as novel opens she's been to a party and has flirted with a well-known portrait painter, a Copley or Singer like character, incorrectly believing he's top society, and she's ignored the advances of a small, shy man - later to realize that he's the real deal. She gets invited to a dinner party through his sister and there she makes, or at least thinks she does, a very bad impression - and again shows her ignorance as she's surprised at the relative simplicity of their home, totally missing the point that the truly wealthy don't need the lavish displays of the arriviste. Her father is the typical Jamesian businessman, stupid and indulgent of his wife and daughter's whims with no understanding of them and no real sense of a place in the world. the novel will of course involve all the sorting out of relationships, lessons learned, sadly or even tragically, and a deep sharp ironic stab at the social conventions of the day. Lead character more involved and engaged than the typical James protagonist - but facing the same "problem" as other Wharton protagonists: whether it's safe to defy social conventions, and if so at what cost? She will never, I think, be a radical or renegade - her view is too limited - but she may journey from innocence to experience.