Customer Reviews

Spoils of Poynton (Oxford World's Classics)

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This was one of Raymond Chandler's favorite Henry James books. He said he doubted anyone would ever do a better social evocation. That's why, he said, he wrote mystery stories: it was obvious someone could write a better mystery story than had yet been written.

I suspect the cruel older woman and the sensitive younger one in Chandler's THE HIGH WINDOW are based on characters from THE SPOILS OF POYNTON.

SPOILS is a straight love story, by the way, as short and intense as a Harlequin novel. One of James's great advantages over Harlequin novelists, though, is that you never know if a love story of his is going to end happily. Sometimes it does; sometimes it ends tragically; sometimes the lovers break up in an easygoing way; sometimes they marry for life. Because you can't be sure in advance how things are going to go, the suspense is much greater. Of course, lots of romance readers don't like any real suspense, but if you DO like it, you'll certainly get it here.

Henry James makes it perfectly clear in his preface, too, that his heroine is smarter than her lover and everyone else she has to deal with. He doesn't take any particular feminist stance: just creates a strong, brilliant woman and gets on with the story.

After POYNTON you get excerpts from Henry James's notebooks made while he was putting the whole story together. It's like a one-man Hollywood story conference, and the way he juggles the plot around is delicious. Only in the late nineteenth century could a short story writer be so commercial and so high-minded all at the same time. Twenty percent of the population was illiterate, but those who had enough time and education to consume fiction wanted a very high class of good entertainment.

The Penguin Kindle edition of SPOILS has the preface and his working papers, with good modern notes and a good introduction. For some reason this novel isn't available in all the Kindle collecteds. Completists and fans couldn't get a better ebook than this.

This book is a hoot! My advice is to relax and enjoy high comedy from the master. There's no need to analyze this or get all gloppy and sentimental. This book is a delightful romp around the matter of inheritance and value of place and property over people. Like watching a stage being slowly set for the action, this tale unfolds slowly, and slowly we see the work of manipulation and star dust being cast in the eyes of the narrator by some of the other characters. With such delicious works by Henry James, why read anyone else?

It's ok. I think it could have been done in 15 pages. An overwhelming use of descriptors of the people and their thoughts yet nothing about the "spoils" except the feelings they evoke. But then that's the point, right? That the spoils (these things) aren't individually valuable. So it's safe to say I was a bit disappointed, and I'd take "The Beast in the Jungle" again than read this over.

I do not know why I found this work so boring. I know a good deal of the work of James and understand his place as one of the greatest novelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. But this particular book with its focus on the antique treasures collected in an aristocratic house seemed to me remote as the North Pole, remoter. The refined sensibility and subtle distinctions in depicting interpersonal relations seem to me to creak along in this work. James delicacy and his love of complex description do not work here as well as they do other works of his. I just could not bring myself to be very interested or care very much what happened to the characters.
Passionate readers of James will no doubt say how wrong I am. But this is one I believe most of us would not mind skipping.