A Comma-nist Plot

I’ve read a number of Henry James novels over the years. He’s a kind of antidote to Hemingway, or would that be vice-versa? But this one? I found it impossible to wade through intense thickets of convoluted verbiage. I lost track of the plot in the stylistic jungle. Strether, from small town Massachusetts, goes to Paris to bring home a young man who has formed a liaison with a French “woman of the world”. Strether’s rather awkward friend accompanies him on his mission from cod. On the first day our hero meets an incredibly savvy American woman. A deus-ex-machina if there ever was one. Over time, Strether comes to feel that Paris and love aren’t so bad. His hoped-for bride, mother of the wayward youth, back in Massachusetts, has said their future depends on his success in bringing her son home. Eventually, the boy’s sister and her husband come over as well. What happens? See for yourself. If you can get to the end of this turgid saga, you have a lot more patience than I do.
You will have to trudge interminably through floods of vague subtleties and twee observations linked together by a horde of commas, dashes, and semi-colons, so that it is nearly impossible, indeed, to understand what the author, in his love of finely-calibrated sentiments and needless refinements of European social intercourse, which, it seems to me, are presented as far more complex than necessary, is trying to portray and you will, inevitably, lose track of what the hell is happening in this most boring---yes, even irritating--- of novels!
If you liked the style of my last sentence, you’re gonna love this tome and you should, forthwith, disregard all the criticism I’ve written above, but if you are wavering, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I didn't finish this book. I would have pushed on through it, but I was reading a collection of Henry James essays at the same time, and when I got to the point where he was criticizing Joseph Conrad (my beloved Joseph Conrad!!) for demanding too much concentration from "the common reader," I figured to heck with it. James demands WAY more concentration from readers of The Ambassadors than Conrad has ever asked of anyone, and with absolutely NO reward of a delicious plot or anything AT ALL exciting happening at any point in the proceedings. I was basically reading it for the sake of education and comparison with other authors, but now... whatever, man. Just to be ornery, I'll read and enjoy a Joseph Conrad novel instead...

I left 2 bookmarks in this: p. 113 and p.187 - Where did I leave off? I don't know. Maybe after the 6338th semicolon.

Henry James said The Ambassadors is his best novel and it deserves a place among the greatest novels written by American authors. Yet it probably is not the novel that American readers in particular should begin reading James, for James writes not in the American idiom, but in the rather foreign—to American ears—Received Standard English (RSE) of the British Isles.

In American literature after Mark Twain, hardly anyone other than William Faulkner has routinely written sentences of the complexity and length of James' sentences until very recently. David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon may be cited prominently among recent exceptions, but even those novelists are much more informal and given to colloquial English than James. Readers with little or no prior exposure to RSE or James would do better to start with his more accessible Roderick Hudson or Daisy Miller.

That said, I can confess that I love The Ambassadors for the way that it captures nuances of thought, expression, and gesture; for the crafty way it uses the dialogue of people who often dissemble or do not say or even know exactly what the mean to advance the plot, and for the eloquence and grace of the novel's presiding intelligence.

I wonder whether the plot of The Ambassadors warrants the 400 pages of ultra-dense prose Henry James delivers in what he called his "most well-rounded" work. The novel revolves around Lambert Strether (our hero's actual name), who is sent to Paris to bring back his soon-to-be-wife's son, Chad, to America. In Paris, Strether becomes enamored with the city and Chad's social circle and resultingly, re-evaluates his own meaning. Essentially, the story is about whether the characters "like" each other. The relations between them oscillate endlessly until the end of the book and practically lead nowhere, making me wonder why James went through all this trouble.

The differentiator and answer to the question lies in the author's style, employing stream-of-consciousness mixed with realist prose that puts us in the psyche of each of these characters in an effort to faithfully imitate the thinking process. It is here the novel finds its value; the omniscient narrator allows us to reach into the minds of these incredibly self-indulgent characters and grasp their anxieties and emotions. In this sense, the novel succeeds and it speaks volumes of James' genius that he is able to keep it up for so long. It is as if he finds no issue with using as many words as possible, with expanding each idea to its utmost possibilities. This is brave and ambitious. What it doesn't make for is a dynamic read; this is a book to be read slowly and in my opinion, over an extended period of time. Its sentences are so long that I often found myself re-reading them to grasp their message and make sense of their syntax.

In his Preface to this 1903 novel, Henry James pronounces it "quite the best, 'all round,' of all my productions." He explains that its seed was planted when a friend told him of "a thing or two said to him by a man of distinction, much his senior" in "in Paris, and in a charming old garden attached to a house of art, and on a Sunday afternoon of summer, many persons of great interest being present." James built his novel around what he called this "beautiful outbreak," whose center is the novel's most famous lines, and some of the most famous lines in all of James:

"Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?"

What James means by "life," and whether his novel in fact "lives" all it can, are the questions The Ambassadors provoke. It is one of the novels of James's famous (or notorious) late period. A number of events—his failure to become a successful playwright in the 1890s; his increasing obsession with perfecting fictional form, partially on the model of drama; and his shift, apparently due to a repetitive stress injury, from written composition to dictation to an amanuensis—caused his work to turn from the more solid social realism of his early and middle period, with its monuments and masterpieces like Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Bostonians, to novels devoted almost entirely to the subjective states of their protagonists and written in an ambiguous, riddling, and quasi-unreadable style of periphrasis, circumlocution, and evasive dialogue.

To many of his contemporaries, figures as diverse as H. G. Wells and Oscar Wilde, "life" was precisely what this verbose and euphemistic fiction lacked. In his Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster complained of the later James "that most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel." Such objections later died down when James's innovations became codified with modernism and systematized in creative-writing instruction; most novelists today use Jamesian technique almost as a matter of course, particularly when it comes to the question of point of view, whether they've read much or any James at all.

During the rather conservative mid 20th century, James was hailed as "The Master" and his novels unquestionably the finest and most mature America had ever produced. He hasn't even been displaced from this eminence as much as we might expect by the more recent leftist critique of the canon, even though he wrote almost exclusively about social elites, and from a political perspective we might most succinctly characterize as "reactionary liberalism." Instead, the very difficulty and ambiguity of his fiction's form and content were said to anticipate theoretical trends like deconstruction and queer theory. While he was once championed as the most normative of American novelists, the one who introduced European standards and high-culture values to the often bizarrely romantic and populist tradition of the American novel, he was later celebrated as the least normative, the positively queerest, but therefore ironically still the best of our writers.

I am happy to join in this adulation when it comes to James's middle period. There may be better American novels than The Portrait of a Lady, but probably not very many. I've always had more trouble with late James—I even have moods where The Turn of the Screw seems more like a stunt than an organic work of art—and The Ambassadors is no exception.

The novel narrates about half a year in the life of the middle-aged Lambert Strether. He is a native of Woollett, Massachusetts, where he runs a literary journal and hopes to marry its wealthy patroness, Mrs. Newsome, who owns a business that manufactures a practical item that is infamously never named in the novel—something trivial-seeming or vulgar, buttons or chamber pots, but which in any case stands for American pragmatism and earthiness. Unfortunately, Mrs. Newsome's adult son, Chad, who is supposed to take over the business, has overstayed by several years his youthful time in Paris. Mrs. Newsome fears he's become entangled with women of ill repute or some other untoward circumstance, so she dispatches Strether to go to Paris and bring Chad back, with the implication that this will be a condition of his marrying her (and her fortune).

From almost the moment he lands in England, however, Strether finds his "adventure"—so it is frequently called in the novel—filling him with "impressions"—another oft-repeated key word—that are more rewarding than any stable success in America could be. He reflects on "the period of conscious detachment occupying the centre of his life, the grey middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that, ten years later, of his boy." He hasn't been to Europe since he himself was younger than Chad and feels he's missed some chance to consummate his love of its culture and traditions; as poignant as the early revelation of his familial loss is, this missed aesthetic connection almost seems the real tragedy of his life. He finds himself, in the novel's very first paragraph, glad that his American traveling companion isn't there to meet him at the dock, and on the novel's second page, he contemplates "the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference." His period of "detachment" has metamorphosed from numbness to disinterested observation alert only to beauty and complexity, and Paris is about to furnish better materials than puritanical, business-minded New England for such a consciousness to feed on.

He confronts the subsequent events of the narrative with the roving and appetitive eye of the aesthete. For the whole length of the 500-page text, Strether only sees and never lives, if living implies taking decisive action, forming permanent attachments, or even making beautiful things. "Live all you can" pragmatically means not "seize" but "see" the day for Strether as for his deviser. It's tempting to think that James wanted with this portrait of a lonely man to write the tragedy of the unlived life, but then a more vulgarly robust and less acutely (even neurotically) observant hero would not have served this novel as the fluid conscious medium of its narrative. James, determined to establish fiction as a proper art form to stand beside poetry and drama, carefully limits his third-person narrative to Strether's and only Strether's viewpoint. It is a tour-de-force of "restricted narration" that, by the time James Wood tells us How Fiction Works a little over a century later, seems like the most obvious and natural mode in which to write a novel.

James even wisely explains in his Preface why the first-person POV doesn't usually serve a novel as well as the third-person limited viewpoint: because the first-person narrator, conscious of an audience, "has exhibitional conditions to meet…that forbid the terrible fluidity of self-revelation." In other words, first-person narrators are too rhetorical and defensive ("Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," Humbert Humbert is always appealing) to do anything but conceal their consciousness, whereas the third-person narrator, seated within the protagonist's psyche, can more easily disclose all. This is important advice for our hyper-self-conscious age of autofiction, when the perils and disadvantages of the first-person perspective are too little discussed.

What is it that Strether's transparent eyeball perceives? Most consequentially, he sees that Chad has changed. The erstwhile boy is now a man, with streaks of gray in his hair and a suavity, charm, and air of cultivation that hadn't been evident to Strether back in America. Strether attributes his transformation to Madame de Vionnet, a married 38-year-old mother (her estranged husband is "a brute") whom the 20-something Chad has been, in some measure, "seeing." (The nested vaguenesses of a qualified description placed in distancing quotation marks is a Jamesian stylistic signature.) Strether is persuaded of the authenticity, the beauty, and the authority of Chad's improving relation with his emotional patroness; James implicitly invites us to compare it with Strether's own more straitened apprenticeship to the forbidding and emotionally remote Mrs. Newsome.

Associating Mme de Vionnet with the majesty of French history and culture—in her apartment, he exquisitely detects "some glory, some prosperity of the First Empire, some Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend" and "the world of Châteaubriand, of Madame de Staël, even of the young Lamartine"—Strether tells Chad that he is in the older woman's debt for granting him a Bildung that would not have been available in our crass America:

“You owe her everything—very much more than she can ever owe you. You’ve in other words duties to her, of the most positive sort; and I do n’t see what other duties—as the others are presented to you—can be held to go before them.”

In short—I am passing over a number of complications, including Mrs. Newsome's dispatch of her daughter and other family members across the Atlantic to recover both Chad and the now-errant Strether—Strether effectively forbids Chad to go home, even at the cost of forsaking his remunerative marriage to Chad's mother.

Yet Strether eventually discovers that Chad's relationship with Mme de Vionnet is not as innocent as he'd supposed: on a day trip to the country, he catches the couple in what is clearly a tryst. Despite this moral letdown, when the high culture of the Old World reveals itself to be underpinned by couplings as crude as the manufacture of useful items, Strether ends the novel treasuring his impressions—and refusing an offer of marriage from a confidante he'd enlisted earlier in the journey. He claims that he can't marry her because, if he comes out of the trip having gained something for himself, his motive in instructing Chad not to go home will be impugned as somehow self-serving. With as much good taste as his author, he prevents the novel from becoming a merely redemptive travelogue, the account of an erotic pilgrim, Eat, Pray, Live All You Can or How Strether Got His Groove Back. But at the base of the novel's vision—I use this word advisedly—is a horror and revulsion at the palpable world. Strether meditates again and again, alone and in company, on "what he came out for," and the answer is "to see." Nothing more, nothing less. Touch would be vulgar, inherently compromising.

James—or rather, the reader—pays a high price for this exaltation of the specular and demotion of the otherwise sensuous. Later novelists as stylistically and thematically diverse as James Joyce, Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison use James's restricted third-person narrative technique to immerse us in their protagonists' sensoria, so that we feel what they feel with all five senses, from young Stephen Dedalus's urine-soaked bed to the agonies of Mr. Sammler's wartime experience or Sethe's bondage on the plantation. But Strether is just an eye and a mind. We feel very little of the external world in The Ambassadors, and despite the hints I've quoted above, get very little feel for the Parisian culture Strether finds so alluring.

Moreover, we're told over and over in the novel by other characters that Strether is a unique figure, a "special case," someone who is both "wonderful" and possessed of "too much imagination." Therefore it's never quite clear if his perspective on the action is at all reliable; because the narrative provides no stable external view of the action, we don't know if Strether's response makes any sense. For example, long before he learns that Chad is sleeping with Mme de Vionnet, he finds that Chad has married off her young daughter to a man she barely knows, serving in effect as a pimp in European high society's marriage market as meat market, where women are all but chattel (contrast the authority of Mrs. Newsome, representing the power of middle-class woman in Anglo-American culture). Why does this event not strike Strether as sordid or compromising? Further—maybe I am looking with too contemporary an eye—how can he really have believed Chad's relationship to Mme de Vionnet to have been platonic? Why wouldn't it have been an affair from the first?

Such ambiguity need not be a problem. Later, more experimental fiction—everything from Nightwood to The Unconsoled to the fiction of Kafka, Anna Kavan, and J. G. Ballard—will thrive on a diet of amoral delirium, abnormal psychology, and verbal hijinks. But James, despite the turn to formalism marked by his self-congratulation in the Preface for having used one of the novel's main characters solely as a plot device, still wants to write the type of moral drama he perfected in the 1880s. There is not enough information in The Ambassadors for it to work as a moral tale, however, even an ambiguous one. There is no solid ground in the Jamesian stream of consciousness from which readers may judge the novel's events as just or unjust, common or aberrant. It is all irony or no irony, neither fully modernist nor fully realist, and unsatisfying as an example of either mode.

In the meta-text of literary history, we might say, then, that James, as the emissary of the 19th century in the 20th, failed his commission, just the ambassador Strether did his, though in neither case can we deny that some extraordinary impressions were gathered on the adventure.

It is important to remember that Henry James's later works (his "major phase") are very much the roots of "modern literature" (whatever that means), and should be read in the same way as Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway: which is to say: slowly savored. James himself was cognizant of this and admonished his readers to read only five pages a day (a challenge which I found impossible, but rather read in small-ish bits over each day). In Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text he advises (in reading "modern" texts as opposed to classical ones):

"Read slowly, read all of a novel of Zola, and the book will drop from your hands; read fast, in snatches, some modern text, and it becomes opaque, inaccessible to your pleasure: you want something to happen and nothing does... the interstice of bliss, occurs in the volume of languages, in the uttering, no tin the sequence of utterances: not to devour, to gobble, but to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover--"

This is sound advise, suited perfectly to find pleasure in James's The Ambassadors - the master's, and my own, favorite of his works. There is a painstaking and almost painful subtlety to James's "major phase" (which is canonized in the present work, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl), a subtlety which was growing in power in his Portrait of a Lady but is in full force in Ambassadors. The sentences alone, little labyrinths, make the work difficult to read quickly, and foils any attempts to do so pleasurably.

The "Ambassador" is Lewis Lambert Strether, an American man from Woollett, a conventional but fictional Massachusetts town, where he is engaged to be married to the cold and absent figure, Mrs. Newsome. He is sent by Mrs. Newsome to Paris to retrieve her son, Chad, and recruit him to take charge of the family's mysterious manufacturing concern (the product is never mentioned outright, though it is alluded to as something insignificant but over which the Newsome's hold a monopoly). When Strether arrives in Paris he sees that Chad is happily engaged in a romantic relationship with an older woman, Mme. Vionnet.

The character of Strether is really the height of James's art. (An art which usually centers on the innocence/corruption of the female psyche, most famously Isabel Archer, Milly Theale, Kate Croy, Daisy Miller, Turn of the Screw's governess, etc.). In this work, James presents us, rather than a central heroine, a central man who is affected on all sides by a covey of women (this approach is foreshadowed in James's treatment of Merton Densher in Wings of the Dove) The three powerful women which both charm and control him are: Maria Gostrey, Marie de Vionnet, and Mrs. Newsome; Strether's nuanced relationships with these women constitute the web and drama of James's masterpiece.

Maria and Marie, two names very similar (derived from the Virgin Mary), play diametrically opposite roles for Strether, though he is enchanted by both women. To call Marie (Mme. de Vionnet) the story's "villain" is to misread the novel, and would be much too explicit for a work by James (she is the more nuanced, more subtle Mme. Merle, a la ). The "tension" of the novel, is the tension between those who "know" and those who do not "know" (namely Strether). Mme. de Vionnet is in the knowing camp, she deceives Strether and keeps him in the dark about the unvirtuous nature of her relationship with the young Chad. She is certainly in love with Chad, or with her situation, and is passionately at odds with his returning to America. But to paint her as a villain is too black a lacquer for her; she opposes Strether, but she does so with something like love for Chad.

Maria is Strether's confidant, and Strether's growing affection for her makes his ultimate return to Mrs. Newsome that much more poignant to the reader. She represents the life that Strether could still have, as opposed to the one which he has now with Mrs. Newsome, and even opposed to that which he had with his son and wife before the died. She represents a freer life, one which has elements of European freedom of spirit, and also American values (honesty, etc.). When reading The Ambassadors I can't help but sympathize accutely with Ms. Gostrey. She is the book's closest thing to a Jamesian heroine, and Strether represents as much a salvation to her as she does to him.

The cold and absent shadow of Mrs. Newsome is cast far over ever nook and crevice of the book. Though she is 3,000 miles away in Woollett, her presence is felt in every motion and futile rebellion of Strether abroad. While Mme. de Vionnet deceives Strether, it is Mrs. Newsome who controls him. She is haunting figure, and one cannot help but see her as Strether's gaoler, imprisoning what is naturally a vibrant optimism and fullness of life, to the state of servant. The whole of his life is given a thin veneer of meaning by his association with Mrs. Newsome, but to that point, his life has no meaning for himself:

His name on the green cover, where he had put it for Mrs. Newsome, expressed him doubtless just enough to make the world— the world as distinguished, both for more and for less, from Woollett—ask who he was. He had incurred the ridicule of having to have his explanation explained. He was Lambert Strether because he was on the cover, whereas it should have been, for anything like glory, that he was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether.

He values himself insofar as he is known for editting a small publication in Woollett - a post which he has not earned through merit, but by his amorous association with Mrs. Newsome. Furthermore, his errand for Mrs. Newsome to Europe has the salty taste of a business transaction, even moreso when she sends her daughter to check on his progress and efforts. Their relationship is so coldly economic, it is almost horrifying to imagine a man as potent and vibrant as Strether (as seen in his speech to Little Bilham) married to such a domineering woman, who treats Strether like an account to be settled rather than a fiance. Though the story is relayed exclusively from Strethers point of view, Mrs. Newsome is never referred to by her first name. The petit mort of Portrait of a Lady, wherein Isabel returns to Osmond, is often rallied against, but the Strether's return to Mrs. Newsome, to me, seems as horrible. We may hate Osmond and Mme. Merle for betraying Isabel's innocence, but she remains a strong figure; we must hate with equal, or increased, vigor Mrs. Newsome, who stifles the chance of happiness for Strether, which he is so expressly aware of, which he knows full well are within his grasp, which he urges upon Little Bilham, upon Chad.

Late James. Stuck-up characters over-interpret one another in relation to genteel niceties.

I'm still not entirely sure what this book was about.I had a very difficult time following the conversations between the characters and sifting through ALL of the words to even catch the general plot. This one was a lot of work, with little payout.

Jedno od stilski najbolje napisanih dela koje sam pročitao (možda i najbolje).
Iako priča nije baš po mom ukusu, Lambert Streter, sredovečni Amerikanac, odlazi u Pariz da vrati u Ameriku ''zabludelog'' sina njegove imućne verenice, Čeda Njusama, ali tamo ne zatiče vetropira i rasipnika već iskusnog i prefinjenog mladića, prema kome može imati samo divljenje, unutrašnja drama junaka, koju Džejms maestralno opisuje (ipak mu je brat bio čuveni psiholog), navodi vas na to da ne ispuštate knjigu iz ruke. Nijansiranje osećanja kod junaka u ovoj knjizi je nešto najvrednije što može da postoji u svetskoj književnosti.

This book gets a bad rap, and I can understand why: in typical Jamesian fashion, it’s bloated and ridiculously talky. Everything that happens in it could easily have happened in about a third the space. But the plot is delightful: perfectly paced, thought-provoking, and ultimately surprising. Thematically, it’s a gem, and I totally get why Graham Greene and F. Scott Fitzgerald went against the grain to proclaim their appreciation for it.

n  The tortuous wall ⁠— girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by careful civic hands ⁠— wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English town and ordered English country.n

Henry James is the sort of figure whom you don’t willingly engage with unless you have something to prove. I first encountered him in horror story form for the purposes of assigned reading in sophomore year of high school, was deeply disappointed and perhaps even a little horrified (and not in a spine tinglingly pleasing sense of the word), and forewent/near forsook him ever since until this time when I thought, well. I had succeeded with Proust, gone toe to toe with near two and a half thousand pages of Arabian Nights, and gotten through three of the four Great Chinese Classics: I think I could handle 500 pages of yet another white boy that aspired towards difficulty and ended up landing amongst egocentricity. This particular piece that I landed on for whatever reason holds an unusual relationship in the author’s bibliography, being his personal favorite but resonating not so much with his customary fan base, so it seemed as good a way as any to get a more legitimate sense of James’ authorial priorities rather than simply relying on average rating combined with reading count. Reading proved both more arduous yet less intensive than I had imagined, and I found myself wondering about figures who treated the inculcated habitus as human reality and couldn’t confront sex, gender, and all that jazz without fifty pages of metaphor and another ten or so of sidelong, blink and you miss it inconsistencies. Still, I found myself awfully fond at parts, and the potential for queer sensuality would have been unlimited had James taken the small extra step, so that and a few choice sections is where the third star is coming from. It's not enough to convince me to commit to the half baker's dozen or so of the James canon that certain lauded reading lists are laden down by, but neither was it sufficient to close the door on the author entirely.

n  He was young too then, the gentleman up there ⁠— he was very young; young enough apparently to be amused at any elderly watcher, to be curious even to see what the elderly watcher would do on finding himself watched.n

Europe vs the USA. Old money vs new. Colonialism vs slavery. It's something that many can talk about without ever naming it for what it is, and James certainly does that in spades with his man-trades-future-stepson-for-potential-wife, where the puritan emboldened by manufacturing wealth views the femme du monde uplifted by landed blood with utmost hatred as men, their ultimate source for both social standing and legal representation, flit between the two in dilettantism and in greed. All that would have been nigh unbearable had the various introductions not spilled their guts so early on, but it also helped that, while James himself is far too wriggling to nail down to a singularly pointed phrase that can be encompassed in less than 50 words, the true love affair he details is not one that involves a single woman, however good her breeding or unquestionable her conduct. From a scene where the main character covertly appraises a young man across the street in a manner that in any sort of cishet scenario would be immediately termed 'flirtation' to a moment where the same main character thinks he can understand how women en masse would be attracted to specific man (if not so many shortened words), there are certainly lines being drawn and dances being performed, but if you had to choose between one enacted between two adult and overtly consenting parties and one where at least one partner rode the line between manic pixie dream girl and shadowy harridan, you tell me which is the more credible romance. Of course such dreamings aren't confirmed in any concrete reality, but it tied the story together better for me than anything else would, so I'll keep it for what it means to me and meander on innocuously otherwise.

n  'Well,' said little Bilham, 'you're not a person to whom it's easy to tell things you don't want to know.[']n

I'm still having a hell of a time wrapping my reading life around my full time work life, so apologies if this review comes off as rather clipped. In any case, despite my middling rating and my less than impressed comments, there's still something to this whole style of writing that makes me think I'll have to try my hand at least one more before I make or break with the rest of it. I'm not even going to bother committing to any one James work at the moment, but he's hardly a rare figure at book sales, and if I come across something that fits the moment and my mood, well. It's a matter of recognizing when direct to the point serves best and when turnabout upon turnabout upon turnabout really does reflect a closer mirror to one's interiority, and while James could be infuriatingly dull sometimes in terms of what he thought it was worth saying twenty different ways, his sensuality when he let it run loose was borderline unmatched. It's worth exploring on at least one future occasion, and perhaps even the infamous "The Turn of the Screw" will get a second chance in my far more aged book. Until then, I leave whoever reads this with some description of the more tedious realities and a less than well argued promise of something beyond the heterosexual pale. Whether you consider that worth trudging 500+ pages for is for you to decide.

n  
Had I, meanwhile, made him at once hero and historian, endowed him with the romantic privilege of the 'first person' ⁠— the darkest abyss of romance this, inveterately, when enjoyed on the grand scale ⁠— variety, and many other queer matters as well, might have been smuggled in by a back door.

-H. James, Preface to the New York Editionn