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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Psychological Policier,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Awkward Age (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) (Hardcover)
If you are not prepared to read several scenes in this novel slowly and often, there is a very good chance that, like many academic reviewers, you will leave it thinking less well of the characters in it than you do of yourself for having, with only moderate encouragement from James, "seen through them." Not many of them are easy to like. Mrs. Brook in particular is, as James clearly implies in his preface to the New York edition, essentially a character in a French novel--charming, beautiful, terminally manipulative. But the pleasure of this book is precisely that it obliges you, by the precise obliquity of its writing, to recurively correct your notions as you move through a series of set scenes, transferring your allegiances as characters initially attractive come to seem less so, and as characters less attractive come, by their honesty or their helplessness, to the moral fore. The long scene at Tishy Grendon's, in which everything comes to a kind of moral head, craves such careful reading that even inveterately fascinated and loyalist readers of James will need to piece their way through it very slowly. Critics and readers who, understandably, wonder why all this fuss is made about people themselves ultimately trivial, need to be reminded that James spent his life as a writer teaching us, by the difficulty of his writing, to read (in just the same way that Bach teaches us to listen). It is "the fascination of what's difficult" that keeps us turning pages, though it must be said that what's difficult here is considerably less so than, say, in The Golden Bowl or The Wings Of The Dove. Ultimately, what is upheld in these novels is the willingness, in a world riddled with well bred rottenness, evil in spotless linen, to live without self pity or bitterness, and for this alone James should be required reading for Americans of the 21st Century.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An underrated novel by the great novelist.,
By
This review is from: The Awkward Age (Worlds Classics) (Paperback)
This is a surprisingly fine novel, so often overlooked, by James. About the usual upper-class Londoners near the turn of the century. In this case, disturbed by the arrival of an acquaintance of the earlier generation, one women in particular, and his effect upon the marital prospects of that woman's granddaughter, with whom he establishes a special relationship. Each person has an agenda, often at complex cross-purposes, filtered through misunderstandings, indirectness in communications, and the hypocrisy of greed and social ambitions. One need only get through James' penchant for the prepositional phrase, and his characters' habit of so seldom saying anything simply and directly. to be rewarded with a rare reading experience.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
one of James's best,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Awkward Age (Worlds Classics) (Paperback)
An absolutely amazing book, and one of the best examples of the qualities that make Henry James unique. What James presents us with is basically a group of people whose fate is already determined on the novel's first page. The entire narrative course of the book consists of the schemes and rationalizations these characters put together in a series of unsuccessful attempts to alter or deny their various fates. A beautiful instance of the idea that language, and the fantasies constructed by language, form a "parallel universe" of sorts, which exists both as a reflection of and a divergence from the physical reality in which James' characters exist. Really not to be missed
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