The Wings of the Dove (The Modern Library Classics)

Rating:
Summary: better than I'd expected . . .
Review: It's easy to get overwhelmed by the joy an author takes in their subject. Certainly Henry James had but one: The innocence and naiveity of young America getting seduced, transformed and all-together changed by its confrontation with an old world Europe that is more brutal and desperate than all the regularly criticized American vulgarities. Now James was a consummate stylist--a brilliant writer of carefully diagrammed and constructed sentences and an, at times, of needless and excessively subtle growing menace. This can make for an often turgid, frequently dull narrative--the work of a man far more interested in style than in the substance of anything actually going on in his shrouded characters' lives.

Fortunately The Wings of the Dove is a better example of James at work: a plot that is outlined from the very beginning and a consistant approach to his theme that hardly ever bogs down with over-explanation. It is a good book, an at times even brilliant book, with a story that is clearly inevitable but with enough emphasis on its character's individual humanity to allow for disclosure of independant diversions.

I had little interest in this book when I started, my experience with James ruined in the past by the pretention of college professors and a sodden girth of contrary critical study, each promoting a specific agenda more concerned with condemning one view than with promoting another. This book is no doubt open to just as furious a debate as, say, Portrait of a Lady or The Bostonians (although with such a tame story, as with all, that I have considerable doubt that enough of today's readers can be inspired to even care--), but it remains more focused on telling its story than in confusing the reader by expressing the confused frame of its characters' perceptions.

Better than average stuff from that still school of dialectitions who seem somehow so nervous and rigid when relating all those dark urges they know are buried underneath.

Rating:
Summary: better than I'd expected . . .
Review: It's easy to get overwhelmed by the joy an author takes in their subject. Certainly Henry James had but one: The innocence and naiveity of young America getting seduced, transformed and all-together changed by its confrontation with an old world Europe that is more brutal and desperate than all the regularly criticized American vulgarities. Now James was a consummate stylist--a brilliant writer of carefully diagrammed and constructed sentences and an, at times, of needless and excessively subtle growing menace. This can make for an often turgid, frequently dull narrative--the work of a man far more interested in style than in the substance of anything actually going on in his shrouded characters' lives.

Fortunately The Wings of the Dove is a better example of James at work: a plot that is outlined from the very beginning and a consistant approach to his theme that hardly ever bogs down with over-explanation. It is a good book, an at times even brilliant book, with a story that is clearly inevitable but with enough emphasis on its character's individual humanity to allow for disclosure of independant diversions.

I had little interest in this book when I started, my experience with James ruined in the past by the pretention of college professors and a sodden girth of contrary critical study, each promoting a specific agenda more concerned with condemning one view than with promoting another. This book is no doubt open to just as furious a debate as, say, Portrait of a Lady or The Bostonians (although with such a tame story, as with all, that I have considerable doubt that enough of today's readers can be inspired to even care--), but it remains more focused on telling its story than in confusing the reader by expressing the confused frame of its characters' perceptions.

Better than average stuff from that still school of dialectitions who seem somehow so nervous and rigid when relating all those dark urges they know are buried underneath.

Rating:
Summary: Oh Henry James, Why Did You Hate Your Readers So?
Review: Some authors (let's say William Faulkner, for example) are able to challenge their readers without alienating them. While reading Faulkner, I know I am in the hands of a master who is not going to let me flounder. He's passionate about the story he wants to tell, and he wants me to get as much from it as he himself does.

Then there are the other authors (like....oh, I don't know....Henry James perhaps) who get so involved in the story they are telling that they forget they are trying to tell it to somebody. What us unlucky readers get, as a result, is a thick, ponderous, obtuse work of fiction that will likely mean much more to its author than to anybody else.

What is "The Wings of the Dove" about, you ask? I don't really know. It has something to do with two forbidden lovers plotting to abscond with the fortune of an ailing American heiress, and at a higher level it's about American innocence being corrupted by European cynicism. But it doesn't much matter what the novel is about, because all ideas and developments are buried underneath a mountain of suffocating prose that foils all attempts at comprehension.

I don't know how James got the reputation for being a poetic, beautiful writer. Rarely have I run into writing more clunky in nature, every sentence chopped into pieces with the shrapnel of commas and dependent clauses. This novel feels like a rough draft; it's as if James first got all of his ideas down on paper no matter how awkwardly, but then forgot to go back and clean it up. I don't really care for Hemingway much either, but I'm craving his pointed, crystalline prose just to wash the taste of James from my mouth.

Rating:
Summary: Innocence in Flight
Review: This is a story with an evocative London and Venetian setting that features two young women; Kate, a rare English Rose, and Millie, an American heiress. Their 'instant sisterhood,'with its questionable roots and rapid development is dramatically loving on a surface that hides a whirlpool of darker motives. The English girl has the manor and the man; while the American has the wealth and the tragic curses that often accompany it. Beautiful Kate, is in love with Merton Densher, a journalist with an education and a job, but with very little money. Though they wish to marry, Kate's aunt, who is her benefactress, opposes it and threatens to cut her neice off, should she procede against her wishes. Kate also comes from a cursed family. Her mother is dead, from worry, generated from her rogue yet romantic father. His gambling and generally shameful behavior is only underscored by the fact that he rejects Kate's offer to give up her aunt's protection and come to him as his hostess. That he refuses and urges her back to the manor and the manipulation, that he is reinforced by her two elder sisters who also see dollar signs throughout; may serve as some justification for Kate's calculated and extreme betrayal and exploitation of the American, Millie.
James provides opulent settings and rare, ravishing beauty with an almost addictive love angle. Yet, the story is somewhat too narrow for the length of the book. The characters are believable and compelling, but they merely tease the reader into thinking that they are changing creating some confusion and sense of plodding. This book however, is a major moral statement about the nature of love and the fine line of sin that often intersects it. The decisions that Kate made and Merton reluctantly agreed to carry out, with regard to Millie; ultimately, like a devil's pact, lead to the desired end which is no longer either desirable or emotionally palatable to the victors. Beyond that, Kate too, cold and quick, is herself a victim; of a family, a culture and of a paradoxical passion which she cannot for all of her skepticism, eliminate.
Not the best James by a long shot, but an interesting peak into his later life insistence on retribution as dealt to those guilty of ravaging betrayal.

Rating:
Summary: Innocence in Flight
Review: This is a story with an evocative London and Venetian setting that features two young women; Kate, a rare English Rose, and Millie, an American heiress. Their 'instant sisterhood,'with its questionable roots and rapid development is dramatically loving on a surface that hides a whirlpool of darker motives. The English girl has the manor and the man; while the American has the wealth and the tragic curses that often accompany it. Beautiful Kate, is in love with Merton Densher, a journalist with an education and a job, but with very little money. Though they wish to marry, Kate's aunt, who is her benefactress, opposes it and threatens to cut her neice off, should she procede against her wishes. Kate also comes from a cursed family. Her mother is dead, from worry, generated from her rogue yet romantic father. His gambling and generally shameful behavior is only underscored by the fact that he rejects Kate's offer to give up her aunt's protection and come to him as his hostess. That he refuses and urges her back to the manor and the manipulation, that he is reinforced by her two elder sisters who also see dollar signs throughout; may serve as some justification for Kate's calculated and extreme betrayal and exploitation of the American, Millie.
James provides opulent settings and rare, ravishing beauty with an almost addictive love angle. Yet, the story is somewhat too narrow for the length of the book. The characters are believable and compelling, but they merely tease the reader into thinking that they are changing creating some confusion and sense of plodding. This book however, is a major moral statement about the nature of love and the fine line of sin that often intersects it. The decisions that Kate made and Merton reluctantly agreed to carry out, with regard to Millie; ultimately, like a devil's pact, lead to the desired end which is no longer either desirable or emotionally palatable to the victors. Beyond that, Kate too, cold and quick, is herself a victim; of a family, a culture and of a paradoxical passion which she cannot for all of her skepticism, eliminate.
Not the best James by a long shot, but an interesting peak into his later life insistence on retribution as dealt to those guilty of ravaging betrayal.