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3.29 AVERAGE
3.29 AVERAGE
I read The Bostonians coming fresh off of reading [b:Cloud Cuckoo Land|56783258|Cloud Cuckoo Land|Anthony Doerr|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1618589128l/56783258._SY75_.jpg|88757679] and I am a bit astonished at the contrast. The latter is a contemporary novel with an obvious underlying ethos which I am predominantly in line with, but feels flat and a bit lifeless. The Bostonians has the two strikes against it of being both old (as in of-a-time-that-is-difficult-to-inhabit) and spending its time making the repugnant argument that women are less then men. And yet - its characters are alive, are real people with great depth. I immediately fell into and was consumed by the story. And yeah, at the end, there is a kind of Atlas Shrugged-type ending where the unabashed misoginyst persuades the impressionable young woman to leave her life for him. And along the way there are a lot of confused arguments that are mostly nonsense now. I’m not really sure how it stood up in the context of its time, I am inclined to believe that James meant it to appeal to both “sides of the woman question” whatever that means. I mean all in all, it was more sympathetic to lesbians than you expect from a 19th century writer? Politics aside, it beats out Atlas Shrugged in at least being an admirable work of art.
I picked up this book because a) I had never read Henry James, and it felt like time to change that, b) I was living in Boston at the time, and c) I read that it was based in the early American feminist movement, which I'm always interested in learning more about.
It took me more than a year of being distracted by other books to finish this one. The writing is dense, the descriptions go on for pages, and there's not much of a plot- the entire novel is an account of the three main characters' changing mental states as they grapple with their belief systems. I enjoyed the descriptions of specific places in Boston, like the music hall and Back Bay, that don't seem to have changed since 1886. Some of the conversations between characters were hilarious, while others were downright depressing. That being said, the psychological "analysis" by the author of his character's thoughts were the highlight of the book. I wouldn't call the conclusion satisfying, but it's one that I knew I had to finish as I came to know the characters so deeply.
It took me more than a year of being distracted by other books to finish this one. The writing is dense, the descriptions go on for pages, and there's not much of a plot- the entire novel is an account of the three main characters' changing mental states as they grapple with their belief systems. I enjoyed the descriptions of specific places in Boston, like the music hall and Back Bay, that don't seem to have changed since 1886. Some of the conversations between characters were hilarious, while others were downright depressing. That being said, the psychological "analysis" by the author of his character's thoughts were the highlight of the book. I wouldn't call the conclusion satisfying, but it's one that I knew I had to finish as I came to know the characters so deeply.
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This was a chore.
I do this every few years. I come across a Henry James novel & think to myself, 'Hey, it's been awhile since I've read Henry James,' as I pick up the book & settle in. Then I begin reading it and at about a third of the way into it, I remember why I haven't read any Henry James in recent years.
[b: The Bostonians|194546|The Bostonians|Henry James|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320389124s/194546.jpg|1189794] is a satirical look at the reform movement that was sweeping the nation in the 19th century. Olive Chancellor is active in the reform movement in Boston. She has invited her cousin, Basil Ransom, a Civil War veteran and lawyer from Mississippi to Boston for a visit. She takes him to see a feminist speaker, Verena Tarrant. Though Basil is a staunch conservative and irritated by Verena's speech, he is fascinated by the speaker. And so is Olive, as she has grandeur visions of what a speaker of Verena's caliber could do for their movement.
The book continues with Basil, who has moved his law practice to New York, becoming infatuated with Verena and wanting to make her his wife, while Olive does anything she can to thwart him.
Really, there is very little that goes on and not much is brought to light for the reader. It is so slow going and was difficult for me to get through because I really didn't care. I imagine this feeling will stay with me for a few years, until I forget & stumble upon a Henry James novel & think to myself, 'Hey, it's been awhile since I've read any Henry James...'
I do this every few years. I come across a Henry James novel & think to myself, 'Hey, it's been awhile since I've read Henry James,' as I pick up the book & settle in. Then I begin reading it and at about a third of the way into it, I remember why I haven't read any Henry James in recent years.
[b: The Bostonians|194546|The Bostonians|Henry James|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320389124s/194546.jpg|1189794] is a satirical look at the reform movement that was sweeping the nation in the 19th century. Olive Chancellor is active in the reform movement in Boston. She has invited her cousin, Basil Ransom, a Civil War veteran and lawyer from Mississippi to Boston for a visit. She takes him to see a feminist speaker, Verena Tarrant. Though Basil is a staunch conservative and irritated by Verena's speech, he is fascinated by the speaker. And so is Olive, as she has grandeur visions of what a speaker of Verena's caliber could do for their movement.
The book continues with Basil, who has moved his law practice to New York, becoming infatuated with Verena and wanting to make her his wife, while Olive does anything she can to thwart him.
Really, there is very little that goes on and not much is brought to light for the reader. It is so slow going and was difficult for me to get through because I really didn't care. I imagine this feeling will stay with me for a few years, until I forget & stumble upon a Henry James novel & think to myself, 'Hey, it's been awhile since I've read any Henry James...'
At first glance, [b:The Bostonians|194546|The Bostonians|Henry James|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320389124l/194546._SY75_.jpg|1189794] is as impenetrable as a closed circle. Everything in the story seems designed to keep the reader out: there is little action and few characters the reader can care for, and the one or two interesting ones disappear from the narrative for long stretches. The background of the story, the rise of reform movements in the US in the nineteenth century, and specifically in the 'reform city' of Boston, has great potential, but is instead obscured by the personal dilemmas and odd agendas of the main character, the rather grim Olive Chancellor, whose smile, on the rare occasions it appears, is likened to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison. Spending a number of pages in Olive Chancellor's sole company might well be the lowest point of my Henry James reading season.
I'm always on the lookout for an angle I can use in a review, but though I persevered stoically with this book, I wasn't having much luck, hardly even finding a quote worth noting until I reached the half way point, page 180 to be exact, where I came across something that seemed to offer a generous angle—plus a quotable sentence that summed up my own situation very aptly: I was on the point of saying that a happy chance had favoured Basil Ransom, but it occurs to me that one is under no obligation to call chances by flattering epithets when they have been waited for so long. The 'happy chance' that Ransom—and myself—had waited for so long was the reappearance of one of those interesting minor characters who'd disappeared from the narrative early on: Miss Birdseye. She stopped on the sidewalk, and looked vaguely about her, in the manner of a person waiting for an omnibus or a street-car; she had a dingy, loosely-habited air, as if she had worn her clothes for many years and yet was even now imperfectly acquainted with them; a large, benignant face, caged in by the glass of her spectacles, which seemed to cover it almost equally everywhere, and a fat, rusty satchel, which hung low at her side, as if it wearied her.
Miss Birdseye reminded me of something I'd been noticing in other Henry James books: James never repeats a character. Every book has a large cast and I haven't once found myself thinking I'd met any of them before. He must have created hundreds of original characters, some of them minor admittedly, but all fully developed, all 'visible' to the reader. I'm almost tempted to create an inventory.
In this book alone, there's already quite a group, and their diversity, whether we warm to them or not, is impressive—and great material for a review. Early on we meet a mesmeric healer by the name of Selah Tarrant, a man with great ambitions in the area of Reform if he could but find a platform to promote them: his ideal of bliss was to be as regularly and indispensably a component part of the newspaper as the title and date, or the list of fires, or the column of Western jokes. The vision of that publicity haunted his dreams, and he would gladly have sacrificed to it the innermost sanctities of home. Human existence to him, indeed, was a huge publicity, in which the only fault was that it was sometimes not sufficiently effective.
Tarrant's daughter Verena is an 'inspirational' speaker on the rights of women, and the crux of the novel revolves around Verena's access to the publicity so valued by her father. Verena herself is quite a character, by turns both charismatic and off-putting. Her mother is equally odd, being horribly annoying and annoyingly ingratiating. Nothing I'd previously read by Henry James had prepared me for the Tarrant family.
Another of the characters on the campaign trail is the formidable Mrs Farrinder who refrains from stepping onto the platform unless she's guaranteed to meet resistance from the audience: “I only rise to the occasion when I see prejudice, when I see bigotry, when I see injustice, when I see conservatism, massed before me like an army. Then I feel as I imagine Napoleon Bonaparte to have felt on the eve of one of his great victories. I must have unfriendly elements—I like to win them over.”
Basil Ransom, Southern ex-plantation owner, does duty as the 'unfriendly element'. He is completely alien to the general philosophy of the Reformers and offers a sharp contrast to their zealotry. His reentering the narrative at the half way point, just before Miss Birdseye, was very welcome—his cynical view of the world added some necessary tension to the story.
A second 'unfriendly element' is Mrs Luna, Olive Chancellor's widowed sister. Viewed by Ransom, she appears sufficiently pretty; her hair was in clusters of curls, like bunches of grapes; her tight bodice seemed to crack with her vivacity; and from beneath the stiff little plaits of her petticoat a small fat foot protruded, resting upon a stilted heel. She was attractive and impertinent, especially the latter.
It might be fairer to give her a chance to speak for herself: I am glad I haven’t opinions that prevent my dressing in the evening!” she declared from the doorway. “The amount of thought they give to their clothing, the people who are afraid of looking frivolous!”
Though she flits in and out of the story, and is generally more out than in, she's entertaining whenever she appears. In fact, she's a character right out of a restoration comedy, a younger version of Lady Wishfort.
Even in the case of characters who have only very slight roles, Henry James invests time and attention, as in the description of New Yorker Mrs Burrage who makes some brief but impressive appearances in the narrative. She was a woman of society, large and voluminous, fair (in complexion) and regularly ugly, looking as if she ought to be slow and rather heavy, but disappointing this expectation by a quick, amused utterance, a short, bright, summary laugh, with which she appeared to dispose of the joke (whatever it was) for ever, and an air of recognising on the instant everything she saw and heard. She was evidently accustomed to talk, and even to listen, if not kept waiting too long for details and parentheses; she was not continuous, but frequent, as it were, and you could see that she hated explanations, though it was not to be supposed that she had anything to fear from them.
Then there's Dr Prance, also a minor character, but one of my favourites. “Men and women are all the same to me,” Doctor Prance remarked. “I don’t see any difference. There is room for improvement in both sexes. Neither of them is up to the standard.” And on Ransom’s asking her what the standard appeared to her to be, she said, “Well, they ought to live better; that’s what they ought to do.” And she went on to declare, further, that she thought they all talked too much. This had so long been Ransom’s conviction that his heart quite warmed to Doctor Prance, and he paid homage to her wisdom in the manner of Mississippi with a richness of compliment that made her turn her acute, suspicious eye upon him.
You have to love Dr Prance.
Thinking about the skill with which Henry James creates and describes his characters reminds me of something he wrote in the appendix to [b:The Golden Bowl|259020|The Golden Bowl|Henry James|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386921801l/259020._SX50_.jpg|118576]. He was referring to the decision by the publishers of the 1909 New York edition of his collected works, to include illustrations. He was clearly thrown by the suggestion that they wanted to add 'pictures by another's hand' to his own 'pictures': Anything that relieves responsible prose of the duty of being good enough, interesting enough and, if the question be of picture, pictorial enough, above all in itself, does it the worst of services, and may well inspire in the lover of literature certain lively questions as to the future of that institution..
The compromise reached in the end was for the illustrations to remain at the most small pictures of our stage with the actors left out.
He gives us the actors in detailed word pictures. There is no need for further illustrations.
I'm always on the lookout for an angle I can use in a review, but though I persevered stoically with this book, I wasn't having much luck, hardly even finding a quote worth noting until I reached the half way point, page 180 to be exact, where I came across something that seemed to offer a generous angle—plus a quotable sentence that summed up my own situation very aptly: I was on the point of saying that a happy chance had favoured Basil Ransom, but it occurs to me that one is under no obligation to call chances by flattering epithets when they have been waited for so long. The 'happy chance' that Ransom—and myself—had waited for so long was the reappearance of one of those interesting minor characters who'd disappeared from the narrative early on: Miss Birdseye. She stopped on the sidewalk, and looked vaguely about her, in the manner of a person waiting for an omnibus or a street-car; she had a dingy, loosely-habited air, as if she had worn her clothes for many years and yet was even now imperfectly acquainted with them; a large, benignant face, caged in by the glass of her spectacles, which seemed to cover it almost equally everywhere, and a fat, rusty satchel, which hung low at her side, as if it wearied her.
Miss Birdseye reminded me of something I'd been noticing in other Henry James books: James never repeats a character. Every book has a large cast and I haven't once found myself thinking I'd met any of them before. He must have created hundreds of original characters, some of them minor admittedly, but all fully developed, all 'visible' to the reader. I'm almost tempted to create an inventory.
In this book alone, there's already quite a group, and their diversity, whether we warm to them or not, is impressive—and great material for a review. Early on we meet a mesmeric healer by the name of Selah Tarrant, a man with great ambitions in the area of Reform if he could but find a platform to promote them: his ideal of bliss was to be as regularly and indispensably a component part of the newspaper as the title and date, or the list of fires, or the column of Western jokes. The vision of that publicity haunted his dreams, and he would gladly have sacrificed to it the innermost sanctities of home. Human existence to him, indeed, was a huge publicity, in which the only fault was that it was sometimes not sufficiently effective.
Tarrant's daughter Verena is an 'inspirational' speaker on the rights of women, and the crux of the novel revolves around Verena's access to the publicity so valued by her father. Verena herself is quite a character, by turns both charismatic and off-putting. Her mother is equally odd, being horribly annoying and annoyingly ingratiating. Nothing I'd previously read by Henry James had prepared me for the Tarrant family.
Another of the characters on the campaign trail is the formidable Mrs Farrinder who refrains from stepping onto the platform unless she's guaranteed to meet resistance from the audience: “I only rise to the occasion when I see prejudice, when I see bigotry, when I see injustice, when I see conservatism, massed before me like an army. Then I feel as I imagine Napoleon Bonaparte to have felt on the eve of one of his great victories. I must have unfriendly elements—I like to win them over.”
Basil Ransom, Southern ex-plantation owner, does duty as the 'unfriendly element'. He is completely alien to the general philosophy of the Reformers and offers a sharp contrast to their zealotry. His reentering the narrative at the half way point, just before Miss Birdseye, was very welcome—his cynical view of the world added some necessary tension to the story.
A second 'unfriendly element' is Mrs Luna, Olive Chancellor's widowed sister. Viewed by Ransom, she appears sufficiently pretty; her hair was in clusters of curls, like bunches of grapes; her tight bodice seemed to crack with her vivacity; and from beneath the stiff little plaits of her petticoat a small fat foot protruded, resting upon a stilted heel. She was attractive and impertinent, especially the latter.
It might be fairer to give her a chance to speak for herself: I am glad I haven’t opinions that prevent my dressing in the evening!” she declared from the doorway. “The amount of thought they give to their clothing, the people who are afraid of looking frivolous!”
Though she flits in and out of the story, and is generally more out than in, she's entertaining whenever she appears. In fact, she's a character right out of a restoration comedy, a younger version of Lady Wishfort.
Even in the case of characters who have only very slight roles, Henry James invests time and attention, as in the description of New Yorker Mrs Burrage who makes some brief but impressive appearances in the narrative. She was a woman of society, large and voluminous, fair (in complexion) and regularly ugly, looking as if she ought to be slow and rather heavy, but disappointing this expectation by a quick, amused utterance, a short, bright, summary laugh, with which she appeared to dispose of the joke (whatever it was) for ever, and an air of recognising on the instant everything she saw and heard. She was evidently accustomed to talk, and even to listen, if not kept waiting too long for details and parentheses; she was not continuous, but frequent, as it were, and you could see that she hated explanations, though it was not to be supposed that she had anything to fear from them.
Then there's Dr Prance, also a minor character, but one of my favourites. “Men and women are all the same to me,” Doctor Prance remarked. “I don’t see any difference. There is room for improvement in both sexes. Neither of them is up to the standard.” And on Ransom’s asking her what the standard appeared to her to be, she said, “Well, they ought to live better; that’s what they ought to do.” And she went on to declare, further, that she thought they all talked too much. This had so long been Ransom’s conviction that his heart quite warmed to Doctor Prance, and he paid homage to her wisdom in the manner of Mississippi with a richness of compliment that made her turn her acute, suspicious eye upon him.
You have to love Dr Prance.
Thinking about the skill with which Henry James creates and describes his characters reminds me of something he wrote in the appendix to [b:The Golden Bowl|259020|The Golden Bowl|Henry James|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386921801l/259020._SX50_.jpg|118576]. He was referring to the decision by the publishers of the 1909 New York edition of his collected works, to include illustrations. He was clearly thrown by the suggestion that they wanted to add 'pictures by another's hand' to his own 'pictures': Anything that relieves responsible prose of the duty of being good enough, interesting enough and, if the question be of picture, pictorial enough, above all in itself, does it the worst of services, and may well inspire in the lover of literature certain lively questions as to the future of that institution..
The compromise reached in the end was for the illustrations to remain at the most small pictures of our stage with the actors left out.
He gives us the actors in detailed word pictures. There is no need for further illustrations.
Very little suspense and action. But interesting as a portrait of the posh Bostonian environment that imagined itself to be very idealistic.
challenging
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
