Scan barcode
A review by euryale
The Portrait of a Lady by Riverside Press, Henry James
5.0
I loved this book, absolutely. I truly loved it and I have to say that I came out on the other side completely satisfied -- judging from other reviews, I should've been exhausted, as if one puts down this book feeling as if they had shouldered Atlas' burden for him.
But the world is not on your shoulders: it's on Isabel Archer's. Her attitude toward life is totally enviable; she's brave, open-minded, intelligent, completely trusts her own perspective and yet is not afraid to change her mind when given new information, and takes full responsibility for her actions and their consequences -- there are so many lesser heroines out there who would've had happier endings. Sometimes you even want her to be that less-than protagonist so that the ending could be tied in a neat bow. You could compare her to Hardy's Bathsheba or Edna Pontellier.
Sometimes I think her cousin, Ralph Touchett, almost steals the show. Despite what James' says in the preface about all of the characters being "types," of the assorted cast, he is the most human, the most likeable, the most likely to receive a dinner invitation from me.
And so because I love the book, I feel I have to defend James' style. For what it's worth, I have never read him before. This is considered his masterpiece and I suppose it's not surprising that "Portrait" was so easy to fall into... for me, at least. What gets griped about most, his "excessive" use of semi-colons, "long-winded" sentences? I could only respond that he's given you a chance to rest before plunging forward and that each mark of punctuation is as clear as a road-sign; I don't see that you could ever get lost in a Jamesian paragraph and fail to find your way out. (It isn't Faulkner.) I would also suggest that you try to view the way he packs adjectives and descriptive clauses around a thing in the best possible light because they're not there to be repetitive or redundant. Cataloging gets you closer to the thing: he is not wasting his or your time by trying to capture something's essence.
The ending, however, is decidedly not cataloged. What happens off-the-page is strongly suggested, but we're denied the satisfaction of reading about it, of really knowing for certain. I don't know that I'm sorry about it -- Isabel is still so young and has so much ahead of her, but I kind of got the feeling that we have already witnessed her at her best, and I wouldn't want anything less.
But the world is not on your shoulders: it's on Isabel Archer's. Her attitude toward life is totally enviable; she's brave, open-minded, intelligent, completely trusts her own perspective and yet is not afraid to change her mind when given new information, and takes full responsibility for her actions and their consequences -- there are so many lesser heroines out there who would've had happier endings. Sometimes you even want her to be that less-than protagonist so that the ending could be tied in a neat bow. You could compare her to Hardy's Bathsheba or Edna Pontellier.
Sometimes I think her cousin, Ralph Touchett, almost steals the show. Despite what James' says in the preface about all of the characters being "types," of the assorted cast, he is the most human, the most likeable, the most likely to receive a dinner invitation from me.
And so because I love the book, I feel I have to defend James' style. For what it's worth, I have never read him before. This is considered his masterpiece and I suppose it's not surprising that "Portrait" was so easy to fall into... for me, at least. What gets griped about most, his "excessive" use of semi-colons, "long-winded" sentences? I could only respond that he's given you a chance to rest before plunging forward and that each mark of punctuation is as clear as a road-sign; I don't see that you could ever get lost in a Jamesian paragraph and fail to find your way out. (It isn't Faulkner.) I would also suggest that you try to view the way he packs adjectives and descriptive clauses around a thing in the best possible light because they're not there to be repetitive or redundant. Cataloging gets you closer to the thing: he is not wasting his or your time by trying to capture something's essence.
The ending, however, is decidedly not cataloged. What happens off-the-page is strongly suggested, but we're denied the satisfaction of reading about it, of really knowing for certain. I don't know that I'm sorry about it -- Isabel is still so young and has so much ahead of her, but I kind of got the feeling that we have already witnessed her at her best, and I wouldn't want anything less.