Thread: Do you like Henry James?

Possibly, I'm a technical kinda reader and appreciate simpler form in general, plus literature is not usually my cup of tea and I'm not overly ambitious in perfecting my English, so there is a rather low ceiling on what I can appreciate. That's no reflection on the quality of the author's writing at all. I finished The Wings Of the Dove yesterday and liked the story a lot. As to the style, I'm not sure. In this...

Good gods. Given your most pressing issues with James, you think The Golden Bowl is the way to go? You're a glutton for punishment! I agree with phineas; those quotes are rather funny and rather true--and could be conversely seen as rather complimentary (except Roosevelt's opinion but I doubt he knew anything about it). --- There'll be no butter in hell!

this is true, and ironically I somehow managed to read his later books ( Ambassadors , Wings , Golden Bowl ) before anything else of his, which gave me a really distorted view of his achievement. I think Portrait is a good starting-place, but it's such a bleak novel!

Quite true. And Gimli too. (But Aulic is no Tolkienite, he can't fathom this particular reality...)

All characters in all novels, and all readers, like all writers, die in the end. Deal with it! ...his aptitude did not come up to my desire

In at the deep end, it's the only way to go! Curious that HG Wells was a friend of Henry James. Considering what he said, who needs enemies? How much is the fish? Does the fish have chips?

I'm not sure about poor planning; I feel that in a writer whose main proponent is psychological realism it's par for the course to expect a little discourse on the external frame of mind: its inner workings, motives and motivation, its moral mind-frame; we are allowed to delve deeper into the pools of the people populating the novel, we are given exclusive insight into the human condition as seen by James. I find that all this helps...

Thanks. I still often wonder who was an English language precursor to James' sensibility and aesthetic. It seems most of his influences were Continental. :-)

Probably Hawthorne, whom James admired. But I'm not much of a Jamesist so I can't really tell.

I had to read Washington Square for school a few years ago and I absolutely despised it. Not the type of book I enjoy reading, not to mention that the main character was probably one of the most annoying characters ever written in literature. Baltimore Ravens: 3-3