The Delights of Immersing Yourself in a Henry James Novel

The New Big Book Kicks Off August 4th

As our time with The Kindly Ones ends this week, I hope that you are as excited as I about embarking on an altogether gentler experience with the successive reading of the novels Foreign Bodies by Cythia Ozick and The Ambassadors by Henry James.

Ozick called her novel “a kind of ‘Ambassadors’ plot in reverse.” What’s more, during the seven years that she worked on her first novel, Trust, she kept a copy of The Ambassadors on her writing table.

“I kept it there…for the scent of ambition: the worldliness of his characters, the visual brilliance of his long scenes, the seductiveness of his betrayals, the veiled innocence of his young women, the subtlety of his moral conundrums, and not last his debt to human possibility, and also to human taint…it was just this multitudinous, this complexity, this far-spreadingness I was after.”

I share Ozick’s admiration for James’s achievement. He is a brilliant architect of character who employes a distinctive style to plunge the reader into the deepest nuances of his actors’ thoughts and emotions. It is akin to living inside another’s mind, conscious of the subtle, iterative accrual of each new morsel of information and the minute shifts that these produce on the characters’ impressions.

Patience is not just a reaction to a reader of James but an intentional effect so that the reader’s working through the text will be as carefully executed as James’s precise wording and syntax.

I hope that you will join us in reading these two novels in what I believe will be a rewarding experience.