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Title: The Wings of the Dove by Henry James, Amy Bloom ISBN: 0812967194 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 08 April, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4
Rating: 4
Summary: better than I'd expected . . .
Comment: 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: 4
Summary: Innocence in Flight
Comment: 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.
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Title: The Ambassadors (Penguin Classics) by Henry James, Harry Levin ISBN: 0140432337 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: March, 1987 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: A Passage to India by Edward Morgan Forster ISBN: 0156711427 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: December, 1984 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Golden Bowl (Penguin English Library) by Henry James, Gore Vidal, Patricia Crick ISBN: 0140432353 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: May, 1985 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: The Portrait of a Lady (Oxford World's Classics) by Henry James, Nicola Bradbury ISBN: 0192833693 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence ISBN: 0451518829 Publisher: New American Library Pub. Date: January, 1985 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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