"What Maisie Knew" by Henry James (1897)

On the surface it’s a sober drama about a six-year-old London girl whose deeply dysfunctional parents divorce and, against the wishes of both parties, are forced to split the poor little monkey’s time. But it reads more like a spy thriller full of distrust, suspicion, intrigue, speculation, and suspense, centering around a bright, cunning, watchful, and—most notably—woefully inexperienced protagonist: it's actually a pretty tense and taut 265 pages. The neat trick here is, this isn't a strange, exotic world full of razor-sharp heroes and eccentric rogues, it's a world full of people you know and people you may have once been/may also currently be: you identify with the lonely child agent caught in this whirlwind of adult charms, and you identify with the "villains"—parents, stepparents, and caretakers—doing their best to keep the child innocent of their own personal desires and their own lurid, interpersonal schemes. This one doesn't get brought up a lot, as far as Henry James's work goes, perhaps because it really has more in common with the dime store potboiler, but it might actually be my favorite one so far. You may get turned off by his dense style (though it's not nearly as dense as his style would get just a few years afterwards), especially because it forces the reader to drastically slow down. Perhaps that's the point though? That it primes you for James's more involved psychological and behavioral depths, and the exploration of emotions that mix like chemical reactions (though, again, things would get far more entangled just a couple books beyond this.) James, I'm told, was reacting against the stereotypical, sentimental depiction of children common at the time and wanted to explore something more complex—Maisie is unusually bright, yes, but she ain't that bright, she can't be! And what's striking to me is that, even today, a complex child character that doesn't fall into an easily recognizable type is still extremely rare. I mean, the last one I can think of was Kevin Arnold from "The Wonder Years." Hell, we tend to see children in our own actual lives as sentimental stereotypes, and if they don't quite fit something known and familiar to us, we'll find a drug that forces them to. So, for me, it was extremely refreshing to meet one who never knew where she stood, never knew who to trust, never had any confidence in anything, didn't understand morality, and didn't even quite understand what was really best for her. And then to see this definitely no longer innocent person struggling to wing through an extremely complex, extremely perilous situation, surrounded by some very deeply flawed human beings, was simply thrilling. She's not quite realistic, yes, (I mean, she's spouting off Henry James dialogue) but she's multidimensional enough to be real. What a fantastic story, what a fantastic book—how come none of you people can write like this? I'm starting to get real sick of reading everybody's lame, wheel-spinning crap. Four stars.