Product Description

The narrator speculates upon the relationships between house guests at a weekend party. John Lyon's introduction discusses how the story grew away from James, becoming a curiously intimate revelation of his interests and methods. Notes and textual revisions are also included.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1594354 in Books
• Published on: 1994-09-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

First-person Busybody
This gloriously written, intelligent, comical, baffling but rewarding novel features an absurd, pompous but lovable first-person busybody. (In fact in many places this novel sounds amazingly like Nabokov, though it predates N. by decades.) This is a tricky and notoriously difficult novel, obsessed with consciousness and the lack thereof, and full of "rather happy ambiguities," a phrase that appears in the very first paragraph. Many reviewers didn't get this "anecdote" (the unnamed narrator's term for the novel) at the time it first came out, many were unable to read it, and presumably this is still the case. Even the Jamesian scholars have had problems with such simple things as trying to figure out who is talking and what they're talking about half the time - even though the number of characters totals a mere ten. Each of the first four chapters I had to re-read, slowly, before comprehension set it. But after that it was fairly smooth sailing. Leon Edel's introductory remarks were very helpful in determining what was important and what readers didn't have to worry about. It often seems that James doesn't intend us to understand everything, or even to worry about our lack of understanding. After a while the notion that one should be sweating over the details of this novel seemed absurd, and by the time one reaches chapter 10 one realized that really there is only one character worth paying attention to - the narrator - for all the others are warped through the narrator's hyperactive perception and twisted imagination. The conversations - the various dialogues in the novel - are wonderful, extremely intelligent, subtle and baffling, but the narrator's viewpoint continually underscores the notion that he is the only truly conscious being present, with the possible exception of the painter Obert, with whom he gets along famously, and whom he at one point (chapter 10) describes as seeming to be "just conscious." Strangely, this novel seems to be about people whose natures or physical appearance seem to change in bizarre ways - and it was the first of James' novels to exhibit his new style, which he arrived at when he was well into his fifties. Something must have happened to effect a significant change in his being at about the time of the turning of the century, for not only did his style of writing change but the first novel he writes in the new style is all about change, or at least the appearance of it. At first, the story seems to be about the miraculous effect certain people have on certain people: everything from beauty, intelligence, youthfulness, can be altered by the power of an intense love affair. The narrator at first seems to be a reliable witness to all this, but gradually we begin to realize he's nuttier than a fruitcake and with delusions of grandeur to boot as well as being prone to extreme perecptual errors. In reading this wonderful novel it's important to remember that the main them is appearance versus reality, and it's not all that necessary to keep track of who's who. It's number 9 on the official "A"-List of the Fireside Reading Club. Read 2/25/96.