∎ Read The Wings of the Dove Modern Library 100 Best Novels Henry James Amy Bloom 9780812967197 Books

The Wings of the Dove Modern Library 100 Best Novels Henry James Amy Bloom 9780812967197 Books

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The Wings of the Dove Modern Library 100 Best Novels Henry James Amy Bloom 9780812967197 Books

Five stars means I loved it, but not the first time through. If I hadn't had some moral obligation to finish it, I doubt I would have. The prose is as dense as The Master gets, and that's jungle-thick. The second time through, I began to see why it has earned the praise it has as one of Henry James's great novels. By the third time through, I thought it was brilliant, and would gladly read it a fourth time, and more. But like most great works of art, it doesn't yield up its rewards easily.

The density of the prose isn't Henry James trying to be difficult. This is an author (probably in many conversations and correspondences with his brother, the great psychologist William James) determined to express the very complicated psychology of complex human beings, a psychology that steps forward and backward and sideways . No character is just one thing: a conniving money-grubber, a social-climbing heiress, a thwarted lover, a very rich American naif. Each of these characters reveals layer upon layer of contradictory motives, second and third thoughts, unexpected generosities. Several of them are troubled by the ethics of their motives, and the final pages will leave you wondering whose ethics will prevail.

But that's as James intended. "I honor George Eliot above all other novelists," he said, "but she tells too much." Henry James, for all his words, makes you, the reader, complete his late novels.


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The Wings of the Dove Modern Library 100 Best Novels Henry James Amy Bloom 9780812967197 Books Reviews

This 1902 novel is a true classic and I can well understand why. James' use of words and command of language expresses nuances that ring true in human nature and is as fresh today as when it was written over 100 years ago.

The story seems simple. Milly, a young orphaned American heiress goes London with her older traveling companion and is introduced to British social mores. Kate, a young Englishwoman, is secretly engaged to Morton Densher. As he has no money, he is not considered marriage material by Kate's Aunt Maud. We soon discover, however, that Milly, who has fallen in love with Densher, has a terminal disease. How this all plays out is the plot of the novel. However, this book is much more than just the plot.

The book revolves around the characters' thoughts and ambitions. Much is not said, only thought, and the descriptions of these thoughts let me sink into the beauty of the words. It was like being in the middle of an impressionistic painting, sharing everyone's ever-changing feelings and emotions.

Never boring, the plot builds up slowly, detail upon detail bringing the reader the essence of the time and the place and the people. It captured me entirely and the ending, when all the well-developed characterizations came together, was the best part of all. This book really leaves an impact about life, courage, duplicity and love. Reading it was truly an enriching experience.
James does very well when he talks about death, as he does most frankly in The Wings of the Dove and The Princess Casamassima. For readers who find Henry James too bloodless for their tastes, these two books might be the antidote. James likes to ruminate. He also likes to throw veils of ambiguity over everything. When the central character of the book is bound to die from the very beginning, what you end up with is a book where death waits around every cover, and hovers on every page. A pretty fun read. I prefer Casamassima because it's a little more readable and I like James' attempt to portray the lower class. But for consistency and evenness, this one can't be beaten.
This story is simply superb, in every way. It is possibly the best America novel.
Read what Harold Bloom has to say about Kate and Milly, but give Densher a little more
credit. He grows from weakness to strength == but form your own view.
I will reread this book -- it is so finely nuanced.
Reading Henry James takes effort. His allusive, complex style (someone once compared it to a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea) requires constant attention on the part of the reader to stay on top of the narrative. Most of the 'action' takes place in the interior thoughts and feelings of the characters in their interactions with each other. The plot could be summed up in a sentence and is almost irrelevant. A James novel is all about character and its slow revelation through the flickering light of his indirect prose. As his brother William James rightly pointed out, you have to read every word to get the full effect (even harder for us modern types with our short attention spans) but the full effect is worth it. At the end of the day, you get a fragile but extremely powerful impression of the three main characters; Milly Theale, the rich American heiress who is dying; Kate Croy the beautiful, amoral schemer ('full of life') who sees a way to secure her and her lover's future through Milly's money; and last, Merton Densher who is passionately in love with Kate and led by her to pose as a suitor to Milly in order to gain her money after she dies.

A sordid plot but James manages to elevate the whole thing to art. Every character gets his/her full consideration, even Kate who is not a 'good' woman but not completely bad either. She is a dutiful daughter and sister to people who see her as their ticket out of poverty and care little about what happens to her in the process. The heroine Milly Theale is the character who emerges least clearly from the novel (at least for me), probably because she is so good she seems (to me) more like a fantasy or an ideal than a real person.

Milly's illness is a key plot point since it is the anchor on which the rest turns so I found it kind of amusing how James elides over the subject. We never even know what disease she has; the closest we come to knowing anything is when the doctor says it is not tuberculosis, a curious statement when you think about it. It doesn't really help to know what she doesn't have but then again this is the 19th century (when the novel takes place) and doctors didn't have many diagnostic tools. Even so, Milly's interview with her doctor is one of the more curious in fiction since it never seems to approach a clinical diagnosis but is rather the sort of conversation that might have taken place in the intervals at an opera house. (James remarks in his introduction that he doesn't want to dwell on Milly's illness, that it is not the subject of the book but rather her intense desire to live so perhaps that is why.)

Anyway this is a marvelous book which well repays the effort of reading it. Some have remarked that the books of James's later period (to which The Wings of the Dove belongs) are more obscure and harder to read than his earlier books but I disagree. I don't think The Wings of the Dove is any more difficult to read and understand than A Portrait of a Lady (a novel of his 'social' period) and it is (for me at least ) far more rewarding.
Five stars means I loved it, but not the first time through. If I hadn't had some moral obligation to finish it, I doubt I would have. The prose is as dense as The Master gets, and that's jungle-thick. The second time through, I began to see why it has earned the praise it has as one of Henry James's great novels. By the third time through, I thought it was brilliant, and would gladly read it a fourth time, and more. But like most great works of art, it doesn't yield up its rewards easily.

The density of the prose isn't Henry James trying to be difficult. This is an author (probably in many conversations and correspondences with his brother, the great psychologist William James) determined to express the very complicated psychology of complex human beings, a psychology that steps forward and backward and sideways . No character is just one thing a conniving money-grubber, a social-climbing heiress, a thwarted lover, a very rich American naif. Each of these characters reveals layer upon layer of contradictory motives, second and third thoughts, unexpected generosities. Several of them are troubled by the ethics of their motives, and the final pages will leave you wondering whose ethics will prevail.

But that's as James intended. "I honor George Eliot above all other novelists," he said, "but she tells too much." Henry James, for all his words, makes you, the reader, complete his late novels.