I hated the new Elizabeth George. AmyLiz -- did you read the whole thing? Because I couldn't stand that she killed off Helen in that way.

A friend spoiled me for the thing you hated, sumi -- I told her to. And I doubt I'm going to get through it -- I'm only a third through now, and so frickin' bored I could scream. I can't make myself care about any of it.

Well, it just seemed so gratuitous.

Anybody here read Edith Wharton, much? I'm spoiling for a debate about the Gilded Age, feminism and Citizen Kane, and it is hard to debate myself. Anybody up for it?

I love Edith Wharton, but I haven't read the novels in a while, aside from The Age of Innocence.

I read The Custom of the Country recently, and 50 pages in I said to myself, This is just like Citizen Kane, if Charles Foster Kane had been a woman. (And, really, I think I was right -- the story of Undine Spragg is an exploration of the same myth, but her "pioneering" and "exploration" and "conquest" are all in the drawing-room.

I don't know whether Wharton uses the same language about others of her heroines, but it really struck me. Moreso, it struck me because we're meant to empathize with and pity Kane, and we're meant to worship Dan'l Boone, but even her author means us to despise and loathe Undine.

The Custom of the Country is one I haven't read. Sorry!

According my grandmother, we're related to Daniel Boone. I wear no coonskin, though.

I read Custom of the Country last year, in addition to The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome. Of course, I've never seen Citizen Kane.

I've read The Age of Innocence (fairly recently, too), but no other Wharton.

Well, okay, short version of Citizen Kane is: parents strike it rich out west (gold, I think) and plop their frontier kid into the richest eastern schools and society they can find. Kid grows up to have a lot of idealistic dreams -- muckraking newspapers, etc. -- but ends up betraying his youthful ideals with a series of middle-aged ego-moves. He comes to understand his shmucky-billionaire late life as a tragedy of "Having grown up rich, I missed out on the seasoning I needed to fulfill my true potential! O for the log-cabin of my youth!!"

That's wildly out of the film's order (it's all roundabout flashbacks), but the idea is that those raised rich all turn out Paris Hiltons rather than latter-day Rockefellers.

Now here is Undine Spragg, late of Kansas, and although the formal thesis of the novel is all about social patterning and hierarchies, I was reading it in total fascination that she as a character dominates in part because she doesn't know the rules of each hierarchy, and thus runs roughshod over those rules.

She's like Daniel Boone, opening up new territory, trying to climb the heights because they are there. In other ways, she's Kane-like because you get the sense that the reason she's such a twerp of a person is she's never been told "no", and that if she'd ever had a hardship in her life, she might have been better for it.

And amid all this is the fact that Boone and Kane are male characters; Undine doesn't have their avenues to success (even if she had the brains or brawn to pursue them). I kept going back and forth over whether to admire or loathe her -- she's bold and strategic and unabashed, but the goals she's seeking are so empty.

Anyway, it's a 30-page paper waiting to happen.