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A review by duffypratt
Roderick Hudson by Henry James
4.0
It's embarrassing how long its taking me to read some of these books. I blame the internet. It has made it way too easy to become distracted. Also, as the pursuit of entertainment has made it more difficult for me to navigate and enjoy "difficult" books, so now the availability of the web has escalated the process and I can see it killing my attention span.
I started this book on vacation last summer, and was quite enjoying it. I put it down briefly to read something else, and then simply never got back to it until sometime a week or two ago. There isn't much reason for this, but there it is.
Its not like this is a particularly hard book. It's about as easy going as James gets. In some ways, it seems to me to be similar to Daisy Miller. These early James' books, before he got totally infatuated with the idea of ambiguity and vagueness for its own sake, are very straightforward. This one was a little bit thin, but quite moving in its own way.
The basic idea is that a rich dilettante "discovers" a brilliant sculptor in a New England backwater. He agrees to finance the sculptor's education by moving with him to Rome, and financing his early work. At the same time, the dilettante falls in love with a woman who just happens also to get engaged to the sculptor, but who remains in New England.
The sculptor, for whom the book is names, is a narcissistic asshole. His sole redeeming quality seems to be that he is capable, sometimes, of great work. While in Europe, he falls into bad habits, and falls for the incomparable beautiful Christina Light (who becomes the Princess Cassamassima, and gets her own book in a sort of sequel.) From these circumstances, there grow a variety of circumstances that range from the poignant to the tragic, depending on your point of view. James tells the whole thing very well. The dilettante may be too good a person to be believable and Hudson's mother is pretty much a caricature. But even they are fairly well drawn. Christina's character is amazingly well done, and even as a narcissistic asshole, Hudson is fairly interesting.
On top of that, its fairly nice, in a book by James, to have people talking about the topics that they are talking about, instead of talking around them. Or insisting on not saying anything while protesting that they have said too much. Also, there is none of the late style's penchant for throwing in slang in the middle of otherwise ponderous prose. I don't think the words "hang fire," for example, appear once in the book.
I haven't quite decided on a serious project for the rest of the year. I'm torn between one of three things: finishing James (I think I have 5-6 books unread); reading some of the books that I have been unable to finish over the years (Gravity's Rainbow, The Recognitions, you know, the light stuff); or actually finishing Finnegan's Wake. I wonder if the internet would let me do that?
I started this book on vacation last summer, and was quite enjoying it. I put it down briefly to read something else, and then simply never got back to it until sometime a week or two ago. There isn't much reason for this, but there it is.
Its not like this is a particularly hard book. It's about as easy going as James gets. In some ways, it seems to me to be similar to Daisy Miller. These early James' books, before he got totally infatuated with the idea of ambiguity and vagueness for its own sake, are very straightforward. This one was a little bit thin, but quite moving in its own way.
The basic idea is that a rich dilettante "discovers" a brilliant sculptor in a New England backwater. He agrees to finance the sculptor's education by moving with him to Rome, and financing his early work. At the same time, the dilettante falls in love with a woman who just happens also to get engaged to the sculptor, but who remains in New England.
The sculptor, for whom the book is names, is a narcissistic asshole. His sole redeeming quality seems to be that he is capable, sometimes, of great work. While in Europe, he falls into bad habits, and falls for the incomparable beautiful Christina Light (who becomes the Princess Cassamassima, and gets her own book in a sort of sequel.) From these circumstances, there grow a variety of circumstances that range from the poignant to the tragic, depending on your point of view. James tells the whole thing very well. The dilettante may be too good a person to be believable and Hudson's mother is pretty much a caricature. But even they are fairly well drawn. Christina's character is amazingly well done, and even as a narcissistic asshole, Hudson is fairly interesting.
On top of that, its fairly nice, in a book by James, to have people talking about the topics that they are talking about, instead of talking around them. Or insisting on not saying anything while protesting that they have said too much. Also, there is none of the late style's penchant for throwing in slang in the middle of otherwise ponderous prose. I don't think the words "hang fire," for example, appear once in the book.
I haven't quite decided on a serious project for the rest of the year. I'm torn between one of three things: finishing James (I think I have 5-6 books unread); reading some of the books that I have been unable to finish over the years (Gravity's Rainbow, The Recognitions, you know, the light stuff); or actually finishing Finnegan's Wake. I wonder if the internet would let me do that?