ABSTRACT
Undine Spragg’s potent memory of Browning’s lines demonstrates the tenacity of his half-century-old verse in the avalanche of modern reading material, for Undine remembers Browning’s words precisely, despite growing up in the Midwest and being surrounded by the crass and trivial journalism favoured by an entirely unliterary family circle. Examining an act of reading, or an allusion to it as represented in fiction, invariably opens up multiple interpretive possibilities. Reading is everywhere in The Custom of the Country, and almost all the interlocutors in the narrative are also explicitly or implicitly represented as readers. The place where reading occurs invariably defines a social space, often through the interconnected relationship between reading matter, access rights and the demography of the user. Two central modes of reading practice – reading for a specific purpose, and reading as a form of entertaining distraction – are repeatedly referenced in the course of the novel.
