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lee_foust 's review for:
The Spoils of Poynton
by Henry James
Moving into the last third of Henry James's novels, which I'm reading in chronological order. I have to say I found this one rather disappointing after The Tragic Muse. I had begun noticing how the mid-period James novels felt considerably more modern that some of the early ones because they had more scenes and dialogue and less straight up exposition. Or at least they opened with engrossing and well played scenes, drawing one in until you wanted the exposition to come to fill in the gaps in your knowledge and therefore noticed it less as pure exposition. The Spoils of Poynton, although an interesting story with James's typical well-drawn and interesting characters, was just pretty much all exposition and therefore felt more old-fashioned somehow, as if he were backsliding into the lazier habits of 19th century novels instead of paving the way for modernism, which I think he does and which makes him more readable today than many of his contemporaries.
I suppose these aesthetic judgements, however, are so time-bound as to be, in a way, anachronistic. Still, one can apply the paradigm of progress to literature as well as technology, no? Maybe also it's our strangely Neo-fascist era and its retrograde idiot populism that makes me suspicious if not downright disgusted by anything that looks backward or feels like a dangerous nostalgia.
What was clever in this novel, I thought, was the triangle of characters around a material dispute, how the protagonist gets caught in a mother and son's conflict and how that situation, outside of the ostensible plot conflict, realizes who she is. In retrospect it's practically a Joycean epiphany of sorts and works on the axiom of those tales wherein a character can only get the reward (usually marriage as in this case, but also riches or fame or whatever) only at the cost of their nature. Nature usually wins in fiction and such tales teach us that sometimes there a kind of greater victory in loss, that it's better to be oneself even if at the cost of a guilty fortune or trophy spouse. Or maybe that's just me and my love of paradox talking.
Anyway, it's really a pretty good novel, it's just that James has done much better work elsewhere.
I suppose these aesthetic judgements, however, are so time-bound as to be, in a way, anachronistic. Still, one can apply the paradigm of progress to literature as well as technology, no? Maybe also it's our strangely Neo-fascist era and its retrograde idiot populism that makes me suspicious if not downright disgusted by anything that looks backward or feels like a dangerous nostalgia.
What was clever in this novel, I thought, was the triangle of characters around a material dispute, how the protagonist gets caught in a mother and son's conflict and how that situation, outside of the ostensible plot conflict, realizes who she is. In retrospect it's practically a Joycean epiphany of sorts and works on the axiom of those tales wherein a character can only get the reward (usually marriage as in this case, but also riches or fame or whatever) only at the cost of their nature. Nature usually wins in fiction and such tales teach us that sometimes there a kind of greater victory in loss, that it's better to be oneself even if at the cost of a guilty fortune or trophy spouse. Or maybe that's just me and my love of paradox talking.
Anyway, it's really a pretty good novel, it's just that James has done much better work elsewhere.