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A review by rc90041
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
4.0
I’ve waited a week or so to let the hanging mist left by this book dissipate, so I could try to see it more clearly. It’s a long book, but somehow compact and taut, relatively, in scope, for James in his late stage.
This was more urgent and direct than either Wings of the Dove or The Ambassadors, more tawdry, scandalous. A certain salacious interest keeps the reader’s interest: How graphic will things get?
All that said, it’s not a perfect book. At times James has his characters observe that the somewhat contrived situation seems like one out of a play or a novel—ha ha, get it?—but that auto-meta-criticism doesn’t inoculate the plot here from being just a little too pat and neatly worked out. The plot feels more mechanical and engineered than organic and natural, and the characters and the readers both share the sense that it’s all just a little too neatly planned.
There are some genuinely funny moments here, perhaps unexpectedly, especially in the conversations between Fanny Assingham and her husband, Colonel Assingham, with Fanny remaining a very Jamesian character attuned to the most subtle nuances of the developing story, and commenting on them in nubilous Jamesian circumlocutions, and the Colonel coming across as a character parachuted in from a very different kind of book, simply trying to figure out what the fuck is going on with these long-winded people who never actually say anything one way or the other.
I’m glad I read this, but, like much of James’s oeuvre, especially his late stage, it’s not something I could recommend in good conscience to anyone who wasn’t committed to trying to understand the entirety of James’s work and development: Life may be too short for most people to read many of James’s books.
Sad to say, but probably unavoidably, James has become an author for only the most self-flagellating specialists and completists, and other assorted snobs. Especially in his late stage, his language bursts out of all constraints, which are generally necessary for effective human communication, and proliferates into a wild, teeming jungle of hyper-subtlety in love with its own sophistication. It’s one far end of style in English prose, worth exploring, but it’s a somewhat forbidding and punishing territory. There are rewards for the most dedicated and intrepid, but it’s not clear to me that those rewards are worth the effort and pain; but perhaps it’s the prize of being able to say one made the journey that some are after.
This was more urgent and direct than either Wings of the Dove or The Ambassadors, more tawdry, scandalous. A certain salacious interest keeps the reader’s interest: How graphic will things get?
All that said, it’s not a perfect book. At times James has his characters observe that the somewhat contrived situation seems like one out of a play or a novel—ha ha, get it?—but that auto-meta-criticism doesn’t inoculate the plot here from being just a little too pat and neatly worked out. The plot feels more mechanical and engineered than organic and natural, and the characters and the readers both share the sense that it’s all just a little too neatly planned.
There are some genuinely funny moments here, perhaps unexpectedly, especially in the conversations between Fanny Assingham and her husband, Colonel Assingham, with Fanny remaining a very Jamesian character attuned to the most subtle nuances of the developing story, and commenting on them in nubilous Jamesian circumlocutions, and the Colonel coming across as a character parachuted in from a very different kind of book, simply trying to figure out what the fuck is going on with these long-winded people who never actually say anything one way or the other.
I’m glad I read this, but, like much of James’s oeuvre, especially his late stage, it’s not something I could recommend in good conscience to anyone who wasn’t committed to trying to understand the entirety of James’s work and development: Life may be too short for most people to read many of James’s books.
Sad to say, but probably unavoidably, James has become an author for only the most self-flagellating specialists and completists, and other assorted snobs. Especially in his late stage, his language bursts out of all constraints, which are generally necessary for effective human communication, and proliferates into a wild, teeming jungle of hyper-subtlety in love with its own sophistication. It’s one far end of style in English prose, worth exploring, but it’s a somewhat forbidding and punishing territory. There are rewards for the most dedicated and intrepid, but it’s not clear to me that those rewards are worth the effort and pain; but perhaps it’s the prize of being able to say one made the journey that some are after.