The Bostonians was not Henry James's most popular book. When it came time to put together the New York Edition of his collected works, he deliberately left it out. I can understand why: the three main characters are all flawed, especially the bitter spinster Olive Chancellor, a kind of proto-Lesbian manhater.

Even when he is not at his best, James is always interesting. The Bostonians is about a Southern gentleman (Basil Ransom) of conservative views pursuing a young feminist speaker named Verena Tarrant who makes a kind of devil's bargain with Olive Chancellor, becoming her protegée and fellow man-hater. Somehow, Ransom breaks through the interference and leaves the whole feminist crowd aghast as he spirits Verena away short of giving a big speech to a crowded auditorium.

My favorite characters were both minor: Doctor Prance, a no-nonsense woman doctor of with no particular ideological axe to grind, and the sweet Miss Birdseye, a elderly feminist of sweet disposition.

The Bostonians is perhaps the best example of Henry James' 'talent, not genius' (as Nabokov put it). Even a couple days after reading the book, I'm not sure how to feel about it. The final triumph feels prescribed, even if it is offset by that winning final sentence. Olive and Vera's relationship is the greatest thing about the novel, depicted in rich and lustrous prose; Olive herself is a vivid and complex character afforded full interiority by the narrative. The other characters are distinct, precise, and memorable (Dr. Prance stands out as a personal favourite), and even Basil has redeeming qualities. It should be an easy novel to give four stars, but the ending! That terrible, unjust, miserable ending! I think it fails as a satire and a novel in the end, although the rest of it is superb.

Here's an anecdote to round out this review. I was reading this while lined up for an exhibit on Picasso, and a man behind me said: "You're reading The Bostonians and your bag has a slogan about grammar. Are you a teacher?" Of course I was obliged to respond with no, but I was delighted that he'd mistaken me for one.

(My bag, for the curious, reads 'I am silently correcting your grammar', and was purchased for far too much money in London three years ago.)

Ήταν μία πιο ευχάριστη αναγνωστική εμπειρία, από ότι έδειχνε στις πρώτες σελίδες...

Ironicamente tragico.
La storia dell'incapacità di credere nella felicità (anche solo per un istante) ma solo nel possesso dell'altro, che per amare deve annullarsi.
Due eroine, Olive e Verena, unite da un amore non detto ma straziante e gelosissimo da parte di Olive. Gli eventi narrati sono un po' forzati (Verena è una strana 'oratrice' che parla ispirata da non si sa quali 'forze', in realtà ben diretta da due genitori disgraziati!), quando entra in gioco Basil - cugino sudista di Olive innamorato di Verena - è come se il buonsenso (in cui James evidentemente non crede) dovesse farsi largo, ma l'amore non porta con se la felicità. Anzi, una lacrima.
Un James un po' troppo svenevole, forse per lo sforzo di dire e non dire, far capire e non far capire. Mah.

Henry James does something quite remarkable here. He has created a story in which no character, in my opinion, is particularly attractive. I cant say I liked them. A dozen craft books and creative writing teachers would argue that this makes for a poorly executed book. Usually i'd agree. But in The Bostonians James has created a universe that is rich, humorous and engaging. This is certainly easier to read than the more later works, and perhaps would be a good introduction to The Master. This book is also more 'physical' than his other works, especially the later books heavily influenced by his (failed) foray into Theater. He paints marvelous imagery. Being Henry James this is still a book to be devoured slowly. It also has a nice strong satisfying ending!

So you call yourself a SJ-Dubya, do ye? And you haven’t read Henry James, you say? ‘Aven’t read Los Bostonians, and you brag about being a well-read liberal from the Northeast? Leave it out, m8, really, because you’re takin the piss.

Not that you should feel lonesome in your distaste (distrust?) for all thangs HJ. The Bostonians took an absolute hammering from the critical establishment upon its release. Here are some tidbits I found on the internet (and yeah, I know, it aint so studious to cite stuff from Wikipedia, but it serves my point):

”[Actual] Bostonians resented its satire upon their intellectual and humanitary [sic] aspirations. They resented the author’s evident sympathy with his reactionary Southern hero. The Bostonians considered Miss Birdseye an insulting caricature… But probably most offensive to Boston propriety were the unmistakable indications of Lesbianism in the portrait of Olive Chancellor, which made it a violation of Boston decency and reticence.” ––Century Magazine 1885

HAH! ROFLMAO. Boston libs getting pissed because a book features a Lesbian protagonist… doesn’t that just reek of hypocrisy? And the bit about Miss Birdseye, I shan’t explain much by way of spoilage, but to say that she is the one progressive altruist that James views as true, in it for the real reason of wanting to help, and not for some other misguided pursuit (mostly of fame, but of love, and respect, too). So they really didn’t fucking get it. They got it 100% backward. As for our Southern hero, Basil Ransom, critics of the first edition seem to be as clueless as their modern day counterparts when it comes to understanding the difference between portraying a villain in a well-executed manner, and somehow embracing the causes and ethos of said bad-guy. If you can’t feel James’ heart breaking as he writes the ever more realistic Ransom, then ye be tone deaf, my brü #unluckymysun.



Of course James’ literary agent was probably pulling his hair out by the roots as he read this novel before publication. Did Henry really want to go after liberal white people, aka basically the only people who read novels? Didn’t he know that these progressive intellectuals are the most jealous of their hypocrisy; couldn’t he see that they are the ones who have made an entire industry of justifying their sins by proclaiming to “help the little guy”? Ha. What an unfortunate voice for the dispossessed. How could they have given James a good reception, or have understood the book? It was an utter takedown of their own ideological bullshit, and to add insult to injury, it wasn’t even James’ point to satire libs: he might have, and did, just as easily clown on male chauvinist pro-slavery cunts like Ransom; but oh yeah, I forgot, critics don’t think it’s possible to find nuance in these types of situations. One is either a good-guy or a deplora-bot. One is either on one side of the fence or the other, there is no in between, no bi-ideologues in literature, just like there aint no Lesbians in Boston. HUH?!

No, the point of The Bostonians isn’t to expose how hypocritical the Mrs Farranders and Olive Chancellors of the world are. It was clearly the result of a place: Boston and its environs of Charlsetown and Cambridge, the sultry August twilight and the rosy dusk of winter, that inspired Mr James to embark on this escapade. The reason for writing this book has more to do with the Romance writing of Hawthorne than it does VICE News or Breitfart. That the politically-conscious among us are so easily pricked only lends verisimilitude to the depictions of social realities within, but that wasn’t what I found most interesting. Instead, let’s unfurl a paragraph of sheer beauty delivered on page 135 of the Penguin Classics Edition, a passage with the poetry and brilliance of Cormac McCarthy:

"The western windows of Olive’s drawing-room, looking over the water, took in the red sunsets of winter; the long, low bridge that crawled, on its staggering posts, across the Charles; the casual patches of ice and snow; the desolate suburban horizons, peeled and made bald by the rigour of the season; the general hard, cold void of the prospect; the extrusion, at Charlestown, at Cambridge, of a few chimneys and steeples, straight sordid tubes of factories and engine-shops, or spare, heavenward finger of the New England meetinghouse. There was something inexorable in the poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of its details, which gave a collective impression of boards and tin and frozen earth, sheds and rotting piles, railway-lines striding flat across a thoroughfare of puddles, and tracks of the humbler, the universal horse-car, traversing obliquely this path of danger; loose fences, vacant lots, mounds of refuse, yards bestrewn with iron pipes, telegraph poles, and bare wooden backs of places. Vereena thought such a view lovely (bold mine), and she was by no means without excuse when, as the afternoon closed, the ugly picture was tinted with a clear, cold rosiness."

I could go on, as the passage continues for another page or so of true somber brilliance and dusky resplendence. For me, The Bostonians is more about the anecdotes of Vereena and Olive eating “tremendous amounts of ice cream” in Paris, of snuggling on the couch and talking philosophy while the maid throws another log on the fire, of Olive’s wishing Vereena would just float away and never return when she realizes that love for her—in a world where the woman she loves is straight and the progressive liberal city she lives in hates fags—is something that will always be unrequited; and it is finding a kind of humming euphoria in all this bleakness that makes this book a classic. It’s the beautiful language, the romantic demon on your shoulder, the lamps burning in the brown and yellow light of the end of day, and all of the attendant possibilities and daydreams. Ideology is meaningless to James, and I can understand that might offend some people, but the alternative environment is so much more lush, so much more beautiful for all of its hints of sadness, that when thrust side by side I wonder as to why anyone would ever vote again.

Second time through? Actually good after living in boston.

First review stands:

Thanks, insomnia, for letting me finish this one even though HJ was actively putting me to sleep.

Two stars ONLY for the lesbians. Rest of the book gets 0-1.

a fascinating look into the world of late 19th Century Boston and its women's rights circuits. It also contains not-quite-explicit lesbianism, although it is far from a happy gay romance (without being too 'bury-your-gays-y', although being published in 1886 even that would be fairly controversial).

It took me a while to get into James' writing style, but once I did, I was really able to enjoy the beauty of it.

Henry James should not attempt melodrama. He is a master of the sly revelation peeking sidelong out of a tangled sentence and should stick to that.

The Bostonians offers a panorama of the American caste system, with characters ranging from New York Brahmins to newspapermen (the lowest of the low) and faith-healing hucksters. Nice try, but James is standing in his own light when he attempts to infuse this story with any kind of energy.

Miss Verena Tarrant is the pretty and verbally gifted daughter of a faith-healing huckster, a man who is not so successful as to save his family from living a hand-to-mouth existence. Verena gets introduced to the politically active subculture of Boston when she makes an impromptu speech about the rights of women, and she is immediately taken up by one of the most earnest of the cause’s adherents, the well-to-do Olive Chancellor. Olive is a devotee but crippled in her own activism by acute shyness and lack of charm (James is alive to the irony of a feminist requiring charm to promote her cause), so she sees in Verena an effective straw man, the public face of her own ideas.

Verena herself finds role this appealing, and the two women link up to train her for a campaign of public speaking. Olive pays off Verena’s parents to stay out of the way. At the start of the story, however, a distant cousin of Olive’s—Basil Ransom, a southerner displaced by the Civil War—sets himself up in opposition, both to feminism and to Verena Tarrant as its public face. He gradually becomes obsessed with keeping Verena out of the public eye. Verena herself is a creature determined to try to please everybody (more of James’s notion of ironies swirling around feminism).

Nobody comes out of this conflict smelling like a rose, though a couple of minor characters earn some grudging respect, notably an aged activist (veteran of efforts to aid the slaves during the war), Miss Birdseye, and a strange female physician who seems to be a case of Asperger’s syndrome. Everyone else carries self-interest to the point of caricature.

With characters like these, this is not a particularly pleasant book to read. Left to myself I would have taken sides, probably with the unfortunate Miss Chancellor, but James is determined to keep the reader from rooting for anyone. He’s dismissive of the wrongs addressed by feminism and seems at times to share Mr. Ransom’s view that anyone passionate about anything is guilty of vulgarity. The essential bankruptcy of this point of view made the melodramatic scene at the climax the most vulgar thing of all. Not for me.

I couldn't keep my attention. I know Henry James caught a fascinating social and historical moment, but neither reading by myself, nor listening to an audiobook had gripped my interest. Perhaps some other day I will try again.

loses a lot of its narrative force in its slouching middle, once basil ransom leaves for new york. but the beginning is wonderfully strange and creepy (james’ invocation of ghost stories and seances in the first lecture scene is fantastic… paired with ransom’s southern pride this section feels nearly like faulkner, which is a territory i never expected from james), and the end is tightly wound and electrifying. this is the james novel i’ve read that is closest to portraying non-elites, and i actually think it suffers a bit for that. here he seems to be dealing with his own family’s legacy as boston transcendentalists/activists, and the result is a bit mixed. not in his normal wheelhouse for sure

6/10

I’ve never been so glad to put down an HJ. Even though this rates higher than The Europeans, I disliked it so much more, but a proper dressing down will have to wait for another day.