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.
"Washington Square" by Henry James (1880)
If the name Henry James conjures thoughts of baroque, infinitely tangential clauses, miniscule type, brick-sized binding, and a crochet of psychological threads, Washington Square is kind of like his 200-page "pop novel". You get the same deeply human characterization—be it an unusually plain and awkward debutante, an extremely intelligent, plainspoken, vindictive bastard, or an emotion-besotted, meddling sweetheart—but it feels more like fun and less like a highly detailed owner's manual for the human heart (not like these manuals are unenjoyable reads on their own, mind you, they're just much more effortful.) Washington Square is the psychologically deep Henry James we all know and love, except it's fun. I couldn't put it down. Four stars.
"The Art of the Novel - Critical Prefaces" by Henry James (1934)
It's one thing to read Henry James' dizzying writing style in a piece of fiction—you work at it because you trust he's leading you somewhere. It's another thing when he's speaking as himself, reflecting on his own work, the sentence structures splintering into a winding, sprawling train consisting of his own lightly tethered thoughts. Don't get me wrong: he's brilliant. And unlike most accomplished writers, he's not coy. In fact, he's very generous about the process of creating and crafting fiction. But he's also an overthinker. And reading this book has been difficult for me because the result is akin to one person directly injecting their craziness into my brain. (Strangely, though, you leave the book with the impression "American literature's biggest snob" might actually have been, deep down, a really nice guy.) Two stars.
"The Ambassadors" by Henry James (1903)
Just how difficult is it to read Henry James? Apparently, Chapters 28 and 29 were accidentally reversed in an early printing, and not one person noticed this discrepancy over the course of the next 40 years. How would I describe the experience myself? Well, it's not necessarily that he's fond of obnoxiously syllabic words, or winding endless sentences, or disorienting modernist tricks, cheap manipulations of time; it's more like James surrounds you with a very straight, very embroidered narrative that's so thickly layered, so densely detailed, and so intricately and so tightly and so deliberately woven that the only way to fully comprehend what you're reading is to betray such psychic stores of concentration and energy that, especially nowadays, but even back then, even among esteemed, unfairly or not, literary scholars, very few sensible people are willing to surrender such intimate sensitivities (his own, similarly intellectually entangled, brother urged him to dumb things down for the sake of the people.) If you happen to lapse, to break, to absently trip, it's rather easy to find yourself mindlessly scanning over a very long series of words, only to regain clarity after losing what feels like roughly fifty or so logical threads over the course of one blessed paragraph. I get the sense that this one is underread—I'm not sure telling you that this is the story of a nice guy from Massachusetts who gets sent to Paris to retrieve his fiancé's son is enough to communicate the novel's immense, entrenching charms. I'm not sure it conveys just how thick, billowed, and silvered is the undulating, turgid, entrancing cloud of story that builds atop this milquetoast logline. It doesn't convey how strikingly deep and tangled it gets concerning the psychology of human relationships and personality. And it, moreover, doesn't tell you how splendidly fun the novel actually is—at heart it's basically a detective story, featuring the world's sweetest, least cunning, most well intentioned, most idealistically forgiving sleuth, a not wholly unfrivolous man named Lambert Strether, a man I would rank among literature's greatest protagonists, but for silently selfish reasons. Which is to say, for reasons I somewhat intimately understand, the book is a difficult sell. I can't even begin to think of how I could sell the people on this book (especially since I feel I could point to any given sentence on any given page, ask even the smartest person I know to explain to me what said sentence is attempting to say, and permit them the breathing room and time to fully cogitate its proper and very well considered intentions—a demanding ask; what I'll say in James's defense is that, unlike most difficult writers I know, I really don't think the guy is merely "showing off" his intellect—I think he merely wanted to give the people the best story he thought he possibly could.) I would argue, more than any writer I've ever been fortunate to come across, Henry James tried to show the people the sheer heights of what we, as a collective people, are capable of achieving, disregarding sheer luck, as a lowly, hopeless, simple, yearning, deeply confused, deeply lost, deeply deluded lot. So I think I'll just leave it there, for all of the people. Five stars.