Prolix!!

Ernie:  Do not read this book!  The Wings of the Dove is the worst of all the books I have ever read.  Written in 1902, it may have been one of the best 100 books of the 20^th Century when published but in the following ninety-eight years, certainly there were much better books to take its place.

Based on this book, I don’t see what the fuss about Henry James is.  The man can’t write.  Sentence structure could not have changed this much in a century.  For example, James opens a chapter with this nonsense…

The two ladies who, in advance of the Swiss season, had been warned that their design was unconsidered, that the passes would not be clear, nor the air mild, nor the inns open – the two ladies, who characteristically, had braved a good deal of possibly interested remonstrance were finding themselves, as their adventure turned out, wonderfully sustained. 

The whole book is full of this type of narration.  At least one chapter has absolutely no dialogue.  But the dialogue is no better.  Characters speak for pages and pages and I still don’t know what they are saying.  The author’s brother, William James wrote in a 1902 letter, “(I read)… many pages, and innumerable sentences twice over to see what the dickens they could possible mean…“  Oddly enough, this was meant as a compliment to his brother’s style of writing.

A maxim of writing fiction is to “show, don’t tell” what’s going on.  Henry James does neither.

The Wings of the Dove is populated by characters you could not care less about.  The “title” character, Milly, is an heiress dying from some dreadful illness.  She meets penniless Kate who befriends her with an ulterior motive and a vile plan.  In the middle is Mr. Densher, who apparently doesn’t have a mind of his own until almost the last chapter.  Add in an awful father, controlling spinsters, pathetic siblings, a bunch of busybodies and the worst doctor in literary history.

It’s a truly awful book.  For the record, I would rather read Finnegans Wake again than reread The Wings of the Dove.

Sandra:  I’m not sure what I can add to Ernie’s excellent analysis above.  Only this, a new word for your vocabulary—prolix.  Various dictionaries give the meaning of prolix as “tediously long and wordy”, “so wordy as to be tiresome; verbose”, “using more words than are necessary, long-winded”, and “see Henry James”  okay, made that last one up.  I could go on…but that would be prolix.

Flat Stanley sure hopes the jackasses in Congress come to some agreement before they bring the world economy crashing down.  What has this got to do with anything in this post?  Nothing.  
Kind of like 90% of the words in James's book have nothing to do with anything he is trying to tell us about.

If you have a streak of the masochist in you, by all means, start on this book right now.  The books on the list I have found to be truly great are the ones which have something to say about the human condition or the examined life or some sort of insight into these things.  Wings of the Dove has none of that.  From the moment the plot is hatched for Densher to cozy up to Milly in the hopes of making some money despite the fact that he is hopelessly in love with Kate and this is all at Kate’s urging, I could tell you exactly how things were going to turn out and neither Densher or Kate was going to live happily ever after.  I guess that part is about human nature but it is so predictable there is nothing to be gained by reading this book.  We move on now.  Thank goodness!

Next week:  Sandra reads “Go Tell it on the Mountain” by James Baldwin