Customer Reviews

The Other House (Library Edition)

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4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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It's hard to believe that James's theatrical turn of the late 19th century ended with his audience "booing" him off the stage. This novelized play reads quickly and delightfully. I've read more than twenty of his novels, and this was the quickest of them all.

The plot is simple enough (at least for James): two houses, apparently back to back, in Wilverley, a small English village, set the scene. One contains a widow, the other a young married couple. The young wife widows the young husband, and he becomes Wilverley's "most eligible bachelor," except for the fact that he promised his dying wife that he would never marry again, at least not during the life of his child. So somebody has to kill the child, right?

Enter James's genius for character. There's Paul, the huge, infinitely imperturbable son of the wealthy Mrs. Beever; the diminutive and impetuous Dennis Vidal; Tony Bream himself, a remarkably good-natured but insensitive fool; and the powerful Mrs. Beever, whose awful determination cows every one else before her. Like James's best writing, his characters become interesting on their own; his fictions become an opportunity to satisfy curiosity. I think that's what makes this book a "page-turner"; the characters are interesting enough that I want to know what's going to happen.

In the end, I suppose, what makes this book succeed is what would have made the dramatic version fail: James's endless fascination with the workings of the human mind must have become either painfully boring or just incomprehensible to a theatrical audience. However it came about, I recommend it unequivocally.

This book is a novelization of the play by the same name. And you can see the stageplay - the characters are continually coming and going - and there's stage business - all of which I think shows some stiffness - yet about half way through the novel I was startled at how much the characters were real, rounded - I could just about see them - they ached with life - I was always aware of the stage during the novel - the story itself is rather shocking - it's a mystery novel! - it's all very well done - it's short - and it's very psychological

I am impressed with The New York Review's revival of this unexpectedly non-Jamesian title. A truly unique James choice to bring back to life--it's been done so with a cover so compelling (I'm not a tradional James fan) I opened the book which I found locally in a brick and mortar as they are now called, book shop. The internet cannot do justice to the thoughtful sophistication of this book's packaging. (But I can purchase another copy here more easily!) The publisher's comments about the work were also compelling and complimentary to the cover art. The Other House is a mystery, a detective story, a love triangle with more than three angles--a true page turner--with a timelessly human plot and "modern" characters. Anyone thriller fan would be enchanted with it. And turning every page, holding the book, is a sensory thrill. Paper, writing, art--all representative of what any literary rebirth deserves. If it's worth bringing back--do it with quality, I say! They did--along with a whole marvelous collection of equally intriguing books, with well written new introductions. Good choices--the pieces themselves, the introduction authors and the book artist designers. Truly timeless in all ways!

Henry James wrote an outline for a play, to be titled "The Promise", in 1893, but no producer showed interest. Never a writer to waste a page, James then used his outline to serialize this odd novel "The Other House" in 1896. I call it 'odd' because it's still a play in three acts, each chapter patently a stage set -- a room in one mansion, a garden, a room in the "other" house -- and each of the first two acts ends with a stunning tragedy. Not only a play! A full-blown Victorian melodrama, a murder mystery replete with the conventions of the 19th C stage. Best of all, it's obviously an imitation of the plays of Hendrik Ibsen, whom Henry james was 'championing' in the British press in the 1890s. In fact, if James had given his outline to Ibsen, and if Ibsen had written "The Other House", I have no doubt that it would be considered a masterpiece of the stage.

Of course it's improbable and melodramatic, but no more so than some of Ibsen's works and most of 19th C theater pieces. Likewise, it's no more improbable (and a good deal wittier) than most murder mysteries of the 20th C -- pop novels like Agatha Christie's, I mean, and immensely successful films and TV dramas. Reading this short novel has given me an epiphany: James was a hack! Or rather, he wanted to be a hack, a fashionable writer, a popularizer. He knew his audience. He wanted to write exactly what that audience wanted to read or see on stage. Judged with the same tolerance that one feels for cheap crime or a sprightly-shallow cinema, The Other House is lovely entertainment. I note, as evidence, that this novel, which all the Jamesian scholars and critics disdain, has received ONLY five-star reviews! James the hack would surely feel vindicated.

You, dear reader, will enjoy this novel most if you read it in that spirit and as a particular genre, a prose-play. It's very tightly plotted. Symmetrical, suspenseful, sensationalistic. James probably had no talent whatsoever for stage- or screen-writing. The dialogue in The Other House only 'works' because it is embedded in Jamesian prose. Henry J needed a collaborator, but Ibsen was Norwegian and Oscar Wilde was detained.

James's aspiration, conscious or sub-conscious, to write pop fiction was thwarted by the complexity of his own mind. He could never write as trivially as he wished. The Other House is clear evidence. Its depiction of genteel society in England is fiercely satirical and condemnatory. The charming, gracious, graceful women and bluff, open-hearted, honorable men in this tale are all revealed as moral monsters. Love, the great motivator, inspires these prudent, proper upper-class Britons to falsehood and cruelty. As a drama, The Other House is as sardonic as The Doll House or The Master Builder. Luckily for later readers, Henry James could never succeed in mashing his complex psychological insights into pulp fiction. He didn't have the mind of a hack.

I find it hard to believe that Henry James knew how to ratchet up the tension in this clever way--at times, too cunning--but it should come as no surprise that there is a darkness, an insanity like murder beneath the surface of the most proper British households, in this case, the people from "The Other House." The tension of the novel comes from James knowing how to keep the lid on, so to speak, and when to let some steam drift out. His art is in the way the characters hold back or speak out, conceal and reveal. In The Other House, one can hear the approach of his future masterpieces, The Golden Bowl, The Ambassadors, and The Wings of the Dove. But there is something about this novel that makes it closer to "easy" reading than any of his novels I know. The Other House is surprisingly entertaining, and mostly dialogue--a result, probably, of his play-writing experience, but also because in the 1890s upper-class people still went to great lengths to conceal their sexual desires beneath lovely sentences.

At times, James makes even the most disciplined reader (moi) wait too long for key facts--more so in this novel than others. I was irritated that he didn't make it clear that Mrs. Bream's first name is Julia and that Miss Armiger's first name is Rose. The name Jean Martle is repeated too much, and I always got the names of the houses mixed up; Eastmead is one, and Bounds must be the "other" of the title, from Mrs. Beever's point of view. The two houses and two families, partners in a single large banking firm, made their money from overseas colonies. And the man who seeks to marry Rose, Dennis Vidal, spends a lot of time in China, where, apparently the British system allowed for a lot of fortune-making. But the women have money, too, and so husband-hunting is not the problem when so many women focus their laser-beam of attention on the charismatic Tony Bream.

But there is something strange, some plot twist that is almost too, too forced in this novel. True, there are seven adults with complex psychological setups, but the women are over-wrought, over-determined, and over-drawn. Mrs. Beever's suspicious mind, I can see; she's older and on the look out, protecting her marriageable son, Paul, and her banking interests, and above all, her business partner, Tony. But Julia Bream and Rose Armiger are fine knots of nerves, over-excitable, and given to wild thoughts and actions; perhaps James tried to explain this by giving Julia and Rose a stepmother who was a kind of emotional terrorist, who made their girlhood toxic. (We never see Julia Bream nor the stepmother; Julia is bed-ridden and her words are reported through the filter of other's apprehension.)

I've heard it said that Sigmund Freud's patients were created during the 1890s; now I see it, through Henry James. Dr. Ramage, who attends Julia, is a point of stable reference, and toward the end of the novel, I thought he was going to summon the police to investigate the murder scene. A less wealthy household would have called the police rather than so readily devise and agree to the cover-up and the getaway. Yeah, someone should have gone to jail; perhaps that happens years later, in another kind of novel, by Zola, perhaps.

A phrase near the beginning of The Other House describes the entire novel: ". . . they faced each other over the deep waters of the accumulated and the undiscussed" (46). Yup. And then there is that mysterious four-year gap (between part one and part two of the novel) during which almost anything could have happened between Rose and Tony, after Julia's death and while Dennis was back in China, and Jean wasn't on the scene. Ah, the unsaid and the subtext.

This edition was very expensive for the shoddy way it was put together. The title page was on the left. Title pages are always on the right. It had no copyright page. The odd-numbered pages were on the left, and the even-numbered pages were on the right. This is exactly the reverse of legitimately published books. Just look at any volume in your possession. Odd-numbered pages are always on the right. If this book had been cheap--I mean really cheap--I could have accepted this anomaly, but it was far from cheap. It cost as much as many hardbound books. It was not worth the money.

Furthermore, the story was very unlike Henry James. He meant it to be a play, but after the colossal failure of his first and only staged play, he turned it into a novel. The ending was most unsatisfactory with a murderess getting off scot free.

A trusted friend sent me a copy of this new edition of The Other House, insisting that I'd enjoy it. It looked intriguing. I felt obligated to at least give it a try. I still trust the friend! I can't believe this is what is known as a Classic. I thought they were all very boring. I couldn't wait to get back to this plot and I'd never have thought it was written in the uptight Victorian era. It's more like a movie special of the week or one of the top ten best selling novels. Read it then recommend it and impress your friends with your literary depth.