Rating: 
Summary: Ultimate Henry James: Hard to Read But You Will Be Rewarded
Review: The last completed novel by Henry James is, like preceding works of his later era ("The Wings of the Dove" comes up to mind first), very hard to read. That's the warning to every unwary reader who happens to think about starting to read Henry James anew.
The plot is simple: its about two couples of people -- Charlotte and Amerigo, and Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie Verver. Charlotte loves Amerigo, who, however, decides to marry Maggie. Soon after that, Charlotte marries Adam Verver, an American millionaire. Still, Amerigo and Charlotte maintain their former relations as lovers until their secret is discovered by Maggie unexpectedly with an advent of a golden bowl, which looks perfect outward, but deep inside cracked. Maggie, who greatly adores her deceived father, in turn, starts to move in order to mend the cracked relations, or secure the apparently happy family life without disturbing the present relations. As this sketch of the story tells you, one of the favorite topics of the 19th century literature -- adultery -- is staged in the center of the book, but the way James handles it is very different from those of other American or British writers. The meaning is hidden in a web of complicated, even contorted sentences of James, and you have to read often repeatedly to grasp the syntax. The grammar is sometimes unclear, with his frequent use of pronouns and double negatives, and very often you just have to take time to understand to what person James' "he" or "she" really refers to. It is not a rare thing for you to find that a paragraph starts with those "he" and "she" without any hint about its identity, so you just read on until you hit the right meaning of these pronouns. And this is just one example of the hard-to-chew James prose. If you think it is pompous, you surely are excused. But as you read on again, you find, behind this entangled sentences and a rather banal melodramatic story, something intelligent, something about humans that lurks in the dark part of our heart. I will not pretend that I can understand all of the book, but James clearly shows how we, with a limited ability of our perception, try to act as the characters of the book do, in the given atomosphere of society. To me, this book is about the way of the people's behavior luminously recorded; about the way of our expressing and perceiving ourselves without uttering them aloud. Gore Vidal says about the book: "James's conversational style was endlessly complex, humourous, unexpected -- euphemistic where most people are direct, and suddenly precise where avoidance or ellipsis is usual (see his introduction of "The Golden Bowl" in Penguin Classics edition. This is exactly the nature of this book, which would either attract or repel you. Unfortunately, I admit, this is not my cup of tea, for I prefer more story-oriented novels. Still, if you really want to challenge reading something really substantial, I for one recommend this book. There is a sumptuous film version of the book, starring Uma Thurman and Nick Nolte. It might be a good idea to watch it before you start reading the book.
Rating: 
Summary: 'You propose to me beautiful things'
Review: The words of Charlotte Stant above, as she ponders the offer of Maggie Verver's father as he courts her, echo throughout the book and after. The last of his triptych opening the American century, it recognizes the ascension of America on the world scene. 'The heirs of all the ages', Adam Verver and his too-adoring daughter Maggie, are casually ravishing the Old World of its treasures, one of which simply happens to be a near-destitute Italian prince of the highest and most scandalous lineage, and who is also the ex-lover of Maggie's destitute school friend, Charlotte. Though Prince Amerigo begins the novel by musing that the sense of Empire is better found by the Thames than the Tiber, he's contracting a marriage to the newer empire across the waves by marrying Maggie, or her fortune, or her father, or the future -- he's never quite certain which is his actual spouse as the book unfolds. Often considered a stranger to passion, James conveys immense passion simply through the almost geometric play of the characters. The Prince permits himself to be persuaded by Charlotte that concealing their prior affair, terminated from mutual poverty, is altruistic in the American style; Maggie, overwhelmed with American guilt at her father's solitude following her marriage, finds Charlotte mysteriously available as a potential companion and spouse for her father; and out of mutual fear of making the other feel guilty, father and daughter devote themselves exclusively to each other's happiness, and the Prince and Charlotte, enjoying publicity and celebrity in high society, resume their affair in the name of assuring the happiness of Maggie and Adam. No one is supposedly acting from selfish, much less material motives, and yet the whole movement of desire is dependent wholly on the American magnate's obliviousness to human passion and suffering, even his daughter's. The story appears to be a comedy of manners, is told as such, with witty one-upmanship neatly compressed with astute analysis, particularly from the ironic transatlantic observer, Fanny Assingham, who worked to arrange Maggie's marriage and who likewise keeps Maggie ignorant in the name of preserving her innocence.
James survives into the 21st century for cleaving to the limits of the eye and what the eye sees, and for refusing himself the luxury of labeling the emotions or experiences his 'personnages' undergo; the brush strokes of perception stay bright. The smooth surface of mutual consideration between the six characters lacquers over the multiple emotional incest, voyeurism and sadism which they refer to with jesting historical metaphors, to monstrous ancestors, to piracy, to bablyonian sensual appetites, as they dissociate themselves from naming or consciously envisioning their fierce desires. Given all this, the book could be claustrophobic, but there are only, truly, four characters, and James, ever on the side of freedom, animates the whole with Maggie's breadth of spirit, her American imagination of an innocence that survives the death of self-deceptions, which sweeps through the book, and which is there no matter how many times the reader comes back to the endlessly seductive company of this quartet.
Rating:
Summary: not for everybody
Review: There are at least two movie adaptations of James's "The Golden Bowl" that I'm aware of: a recent one (2000) with Nick Nolte and Uma Thurman (generally regarded as tiresome), and a colossally inept and nauseating BBC version from, I think, 1972. Both are wearisome, and, indeed, it is hard to see how ANY screen version could succeed: the story James has to tell is internal, psychological, and verbal; not external, visual, and action-filled. So any director who takes this material in hand will definitely have the cards stacked against him.
Er, so lemme talk about the book itself . . .
Other reviewers have complained about James's involved, ornate prose: I would definitely sympathize. Certainly, you can't have ADD if you want to tackle this book: there are hundreds of pages at a time consisting of what seems like mere wordage, without much happening.
In defense of this, I can only say that the elegance of the prose itself evokes the elegance of James's world, yet there is something sinister lurking underneath the prose; in the same way that, I submit, James is suggesting that something sinister is lurking under the superficialities of this high-hushed world. All this, of course, is symbolized by the elegant bowl itself, with its subsurface but fatal crack.
Having said that, I do think that the book is somewhat overrated. It's difficult for me, at least, to see what I have in common with or why I should care about a group of hideously rich snobs that have lived on the earth for decades without doing much good for anybody. And it's not just that: after hundreds of pages of James's dizzying verbiage, one begins to wonder if the author, despite his being able to write like an angel, had, in fact, anything at all to say. Certainly when compared to that of his peers (Conrad, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville -- or even Dickens) James's oeuvre -- this especially -- seems a little anemic in the "interest of subject matter" and "what he's trying to say" columns.
On the other hand, the world evoked in the book, not to mention the (verbose) manner of its evocation, is dead, dead, dead to us. That is, both the language of the book and its world come from a time that has passed from the earth utterly.
For example: the specter of adultery hangs over the novel, everything the characters think and say, in a way that is difficult to take seriously these days. Same with divorce, something which was, to these people, abhorrent and unthinkable. In the age of drive-thru wedding (and divorce) services, it's an uphill battle taking these characters' problems as seriously as they take them.
To conclude: if you're the kind of person who would be attracted to (and able to finish) this sort of book, if you have what it takes to get into this vanished world . . . well, you certainly don't need my help or encouragement.
Rating:
Summary: difficult, but worth it
Review: Very dense, oblique language, sometimes maddeningly so (read Henry James's preface and you will want to throttle the man; clearly he was told his every utterance was profound, whether or not it actually made any logical sense). That said, the story is worth it, and the willfulness and wiliness of each of the characters keeps you reading. It is one big game of chess, and the ending is both complex and satisfying. It turned out to be my favorite James novel. (His stories are so seductive, I would read them even if they were written in a foreign language, which they almost are)
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed reaction
Review: Very long, very detailed, and a compendium of compound sentences. It's necessary to read this book during concentrated quiet time. It can be difficult to focus during a commute. James tells the story of a pair of former lovers, who are separately married to a wealthy father and his daughter. James details the relations among them before the marriage, during the betrayal, and after the discovery.
Rating:
Summary: Mixed reaction
Review: Very long, very detailed, and a compendium of compound sentences. It's necessary to read this book during concentrated quiet time. It can be difficult to focus during a commute. James tells the story of a pair of former lovers, who are separately married to a wealthy father and his daughter. James details the relations among them before the marriage, during the betrayal, and after the discovery.
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