Tag Archives: Henry James

What Makes a Good Book and How Do You Talk About It?

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The zoom book club meetings with posted unattractive snapshots of attendees does not appeal to me, but I’m still a fan of book discussions. Therese Anne Fowler’s A Good Neighborhood would be on my list for a book chat whenever small groups can meet in person again.

Two catalysts motivated me to find this book I somehow missed last year: one was Jung Yu’s review of the book in the Washington Post, comparing it to one of my favorite pieces of literature, A Rose for Emily by Faulkner; the other an inquiry from a friend asking for books about the writing process which led me to think about Henry James’ essay, The Art of Fiction.  

A side note was the current discussion of writers addressing characters’ viewpoints with racial identities different from their own, begging the question whether or not white authors are entitled to create thoughts out of their experience for people of color.  Yu neatly puts this latter to rest with the comment: “Execution, however, does matter. And what Fowler has executed is a book in which the black characters are thoughtfully rendered and essential to the story being told.”

Which leads me to Henry James and his ideas about what makes a novel “good.” A friend summarized his essay into three questions: What was the artist trying to achieve?  Did he or she succeed? Was it worth doing?  You don’t need to like a work to know what the artists were trying to achieve or if they succeeded, but the last question asks for an evaluation – not really whether a book was well written (a construct I’ve often heard argued in book clubs without merit) but whether the book is to your taste – pretty easy to answer and may not have anything to do with the quality of the book.

James noted the novel, for both the writer and the reader, is the road not to moral principles, but to the moral sense.  “Where the novelist is intelligent, the novel will offer an experience that has the potential for shaping and developing the reader’s own intelligence. {The novel is} the great extension, great beyond all others, of experience and of consciousness {and experience is} our appreciation and our measure of what happens to us as social creatures.  If the novel is intelligently controlled, all the necessary moral ground will be covered.”

In an essay on literary criticism, Mambrol wrote:  “Novels should not transmit moral principles and rules as such, but renovate and develop the mind by attempting to engage the reader in the pursuit of intricate combinations of form, content, and germinating subjects.”

Maybe all this is a little highbrow for the book club discussions I have heard but perhaps it would help to steer ideas into a more thoughtful hour of reflection rather than the norm of dissecting the details.

 

The Maze at Windermere

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61mZtWszWnL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_   Gregory Blake Smith successfully plays on the mystique of déjà vu in The Maze at Windermere,  by following five timelines across centuries in one place – Newport, Rhode Island. As each of the five stories unravels, from colonial shipping village to present day, Smith follows the politics and loves of a cast of characters with different yet similar prospects and problems, stepping through time in the same place.  I confess I have a tendency to get lost, and this maze had me baffled and uncomfortably disconnected in its puzzling play of changing times and people, but eventually I made it to the center – and it was worth the trouble and confusion.

The five time lines could easily stand on their own, and probably would have been easier to follow in sequential order, but Smith keeps the reader off balance by jumping from one time frame to another.  Thankfully his clear identification of the year as well as his adaptation of the language and idiosyncrasies of the time help clarify where the reader is, and who is in charge. Nevertheless, it takes a while to feel comfortable

The five time zones include colonial Prudence, a fifteen year old Quaker orphaned by the death of her mother and father in 1692, and left to care for her toddler sister with the help of her slave; Ballard in 1778 who pursues a Jewish merchant’s daughter, Judith, while investigating her father’s political leanings; the not yet famous Henry James who meets Alice in 1863 and makes a life decision about his future lifestyle and writing; Franklin, a closeted gay man in 1896, at a time when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned, courts a wealthy widow and hopes to marry as his cover; and finally, Sandy, a handsome tennis pro (ranked 46th) in 2011 who falls in love with the disabled heiress of Windermere, another Alice, after he has secretly  slept with her sister-in-law and her best friend from college. Is he really in love or after her money?

Not until later in the novel, after the characters morph into substance, is it possible to navigate the maze of intersecting plots.  Prudence is under pressure to marry an older man from the Friends Assembly but she yearns to make a life with her childhood friend closer to her own age.  Her slave girl has a plan for her own freedom but must maneuver a contract between her black lover and Prudence to make it happen.  In 2011, the heiress’s best friend, Aisha, a black artist, is planning her own maneuvers to banish Sandy and gain the estate for herself.

Franklin and Ballard seem to be selfish and sometimes despicable lotharios, with dubious intentions toward the women they pursue; at times, Sandy seems so too.  Henry James, the observer of the human condition who eventually uses his experiences and notes to write a famous novel about the woman who awakens him, has something in common with Sandy too in his calculating approach.

Although Smith seems to point to lives forever repeating the historical loop, he also clearly digresses within each hero and heroine to demonstrate their differences in temperament and prejudices, and their reactions to the pressures of their times. The ending offers a reasonable solution to some, while others are left hanging – leaving it to the reader to decide how their lives will evolve.

A complicated novel with so many more nuances and plot twists than can be briefly noted here, The Maze at Windermere is a challenge to read, but, if you take on the game, be prepared to keep thinking about the consequences and alternatives after you finish.

I need to read this book again, now that I have a feel for the twists and interconnectedness in the puzzle.

 

Listening to The Turn of the Screw

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61biobf7pal-_sl150_         Henry James’ classic The Turn of the Screw has always had a scary plot – no matter how interpreted.  The first time I read this short book, I worried about ghosts creeping up to the  window; later in college, the specter of a mad woman governess who imagined ghosts seemed just as thrilling.  Thanks to a friend who recommended Emma Thompson’s interpretation of The Turn of the Screw on Audible,  I am again convinced the ghosts are real, and the audiobook has me checking the locks on windows and doors.

Emma Thompson easily portrays the new  governess to two angelic children in a remote English country house. She becomes convinced that the children are conspiring with a pair of evil ghosts, former employees at the estate – a valet and a previous governess. In life, the two had been discharged as illicit lovers, and their spectral visitations with the children hint at Satanism and possible abuse. The governess is convinced she must protect her two charges; in her effort to shield them, she traumatizes the little girl and kills the little boy.  The reader must decide whether the ending is the result of a governess gone mad or the evil ghosts are real.

The story is full of dark “dreadfulness,”  and Emma Thompson easily switches from the well rounded vowels of the governess to the high- pitched voices of the children.   Emma Thompson’s terror becomes tangible as she describes the apparitions, and you can almost imagine the silent screams of the ghosts. But when, as the housekeeper, she uses a quavering voice to deny them, the first hints of the governess’s possible mental instability appear.  Which terror is real – ghosts or madness or possibly both?

After listening to the story, I agree with Brad Leithauser, the editor of The Norton Book of Ghost Stories: “Consigned to everlasting misery, the damned are restless in their perdition. Some of them are too nasty for hell, and they sometimes get in among us.”

If a book club is looking for a classic to discuss, The Turn of the Screw would be a great selection – especially around Halloween.

 

Love, Fiercely – Manhattan Romance in the Gilded Age

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Edith Minturn’s face was immortalized as the “New American Girl” in a portrait by a John Singer Sargent, and she was the model for the famous 65 foot high statue of Daniel Chester French’s Republic displayed at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition. Using the painting as her inspiration, Jean Zimmerman reveals the lives of  Edith Minturn, heir to a shipping magnate, (nicknamed Fiercely by her brother) and her husband, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, in a story that reads like a fictional romance in Love, Fiercely.

At the turn of century that Mark Twain called “The Gilded Age,” fashion and propriety  ruled wealthy families.

“… Edith Wharton could have quite naturally placed the behaviors of the Minturn girls into one of {her} novels.”

Both Edith and Newton enjoyed the perks of the rich – European travel, posh surroundings, servants, tailor-made clothes.  Newton chose architecture over the family banking business, and  Edith rebelliously fought for women’s rights – she turned down his first proposal of marriage.  The famous portrait came to represent a new freedom for women, with Edith’s pose “with attitude,” the position of the well-placed hat and Newton’s fading into the background.

Using a conversational style, Zimmerman looks back at Manhattan’s history and the famous families who created the foundation for what it is today. Part of the Stokes family mansion still stands as the Morgan Library on 34th street (where I visited the Jane Austen collection not long ago) and their famous portrait hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The couple who look out from the painting changed  Manhattan with a legacy that endures today – through buildings he designed,  reformation of low-income housing, Edith’s introduction of the new concept of kindergarten, and Newton’s Iconography of Manhattan Island – a six-volume visual history of New York that exhausted “its creator’s fortune, health, and grip on sanity.”

Whenever I can wander the halls of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. or the Metropolitan Museum in New York City,  the portraits always tease me with lingering questions – I wonder who were these patricians and did they do anything besides “sit” for the artist. Jean Zimmerman delivers a well-researched answer on one that reveals the personalities behind the paint. Edith Minturn Stokes and Newton Phelps Stokes are worth knowing.

The Stranger’s Child

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Robert Frost once noted – “…my poems – I should suppose everybody’s poems – are all set to trip the reader…”  The meaning of poetry may depend more on the reader than the writer.  Allan Hollinghurst uses that construct to create a family saga about a poet in The Stranger’s Child.

Hollinghurst’s long detailed story starts in Britain before  the first World War and continues to present day.  The language and thematic undercurrents reminded me of studying the British novel of manners as an undergraduate – appreciating the references to Evelyn Waugh but also cringing at the slow-paced unraveling.  Hollinghurst beautifully sets the scene with an aristocratic young man, Cecil, visiting his schoolmate’s family home at Two Acres – a comfortable but not wealthy estate.  Cecil and George are secret lovers – quietly revealed through a dinner and subsequent scene in a hammock, but, it seems, no one in the family knows or suspects – including George’s younger sister Daphne.  Cecil nurtures the young girl’s crush and leaves a poem in her journal.

Later, when Cecil dies in the war, his poem becomes famous – much like Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier.”  Only after the narrative jumps to modern times with a biographer investigating Cecil’s life, is the truth of the poem – written to George, not Daphne –  revealed.   The reader will find clues throughout, but Hollinghurst neatly wraps up the drama in the last chapter – revisiting Daphne’s marriages and dalliances, and, finally, Cecil’s bisexuality.

The book is a slow read – overdone with allusions, literary references, and pithy characters with a proper veneer.  It’s easy to get lost in the language and lose track of the real story; if you are looking for a strong plot with a satisfying resolution – you will not find it here.   The theme is reminiscent of a McEwan novel – though much longer – nothing is as it seems, and in the end, people will believe what they will – no matter what the evidence.

Hollinghurst has been compared to Henry James, with a “stylistic antiquarian style,” or maybe a poet writing in prose.  James Wood offers a thorough analysis and his thoughts on both the author and his books in The New Yorker.

Read Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” – here