Which Henry James novel should i try?

I was just browsing my bookshelves for my next read, and i noticed that I have three Henry James novels. I don't believe that i have read any James, so thought it might be time to give him a whirl. I'm actually having trouble deciding which one though, so i thought that i would turn to the bottomless font of knowledge that is LibraryThing.

This is a more important decision than you may assume. I generally to judge a writer by the first book of theirs that i read. If i don't enjoy it, i'm unlikely to continue with them. On the other hand if i do appreciate that first book i develop a tendency to seek them out. Hardy and Murdoch are two examples of the latter. Austen, Tolstoy and Eliot are two examples of the former.

I dislike abandoning a book so i am also unlikely to switch to another by the same author if i struggle with the first. Instead i'll persevere through to the end until i thoroughly dislike them. Although with Eliot i suspected that Silas Marner was an unfair yardstick, so i gave MiddleMarch a try and enjoyed it more (nods to littlegeek). The Mill on the Floss is waiting but has slipped down the TBR pile, so generally the conclusion is consistent.

So here's my thinking on my James options. Wings of the Dove I have in a Heron Books hardcover, undated and pre-ISBN so i guess early-to-mid-20th Century printing. I do enjoy reading classics in an older hardback format. I also like the title. I haven't researched the plot summary or reviews yet (thought that this approach would be more fun). I've read the first page and am interested but not captivated.

Portrait of a Lady I have as a 1996 Wordsworth Classics paperback. Nothing wrong with that but not as viscerally attractive as the hardback. On the pro-side, the back-cover blurb sounds interesting and it does reference the critic F.R.Leavis, whose name i recognised from an amusing bit of dialogue in the movie Bridget Jones Diary, and until now did not realise was an actual person. Even more compelling was a an amusing business card that dropped out of the book when i opened it. I'll post the content of that card in a "things found in a used book" thread later.

Yes, this is all very unrelated to content but it's the kind of thing that sways my next-book decisions. I'm open to other arguments, even ones that actually relate to the book itself. Hit me.

P.S. i'm also concerned about the editing of the Heron Books editions. There is a possible typo on page one... can't be sure but it seems to me the "blacks" would make more sense in context than "backs". I also noted a bad typo on page two of the Heron Books edition of Washington Square. Honestly, you misspelled "patients"? Bad omens.

The short answer to the title question is:
"Try The Bostonians." It takes place in, of all places, Boston
just across the river from Jamesʻs home town*.

The long answer is: And good luck with your trial-reading. It may be difficult to figure out which "side" the author is on (assuming that there ARE sides). Or e lse he was an e xpert
fence-sitter and was giving "just the facts, maʻm".

*although the family was from New York and I suppose H J was able to retain some idea of Boston as a foreign ambience.

I would not start with The Wings of the Dove, unless you already have a high tolerance for meandering prose and extraordinarily long sentences where you end up losing track of where you started. It's good, I just wouldn't recommend starting there until you'd had another taste of James. The only other two I've read are The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw. Of the two, I'd suggest The Portrait of a Lady first, as I imagine it's more representative of his ouvre than the latter, which is a ghost story.

Thanks!

Just to clarify, the books i have to hand are The Wings of the Dove, The Portrait of a Lady, and Washington Square. So the choice is betwen those three. Looks like Portrait is ahead.

To my mind Washington Square is GOOD. (So is The American).
Portrait of a Lady is GREAT (and the only HJ work that I would apply that adjective to.

Not on your list, but I enjoyed Daisy Miller and loved, loved, loved The American.

>4 SaraHope:

meandering prose and extraordinarily long sentences where you end up losing track of where you started

One of the best capsule descriptions of James' style I've read, SaraHope. I sometimes find myself wondering if the man was capable of writing anything that wasn't a compound-complex sentence. :/

>5 MrAndrew:

I can't really speak to any of the titles you mentioned, MrAndrew, because I haven't read any of them, but if you find you enjoy James' work I would recommend The Turn of the Screw. I liked that one quite a bit and I am not particularly a fan of his.

I took a long stab at Wings of the Dove once; I liked it, but it was too much work for that time. Portrait of a Lady as suggested above is accessible and good.

Robert

Every time I hear the name Henry James, I start laughing, thanks to someone on LT who compared reading his work to "eating flour from the sack."

I've asked a similar question in another group about where to start and Turn of the Screw was the most frequent answer I received. It's third on my TBR pile right now, after working it's way up for a while.

Mark Twain said of one of James' books: "Once you put it down, you simply can't pick it back up. Unfortunately, I do not know which book he was referring to. I have read four of his novels - the first out of a sense of obligation to the American canon, and the subsequent books in an unsuccessfull attempt to discover if I merely had chosen poorly the first time. They all struck me as pretty much the same.

In The Turn of the Screw Henry James triumphs over his inevitable pomposity and prolixity sufficiently well to create a truly potent air of sinister menace; depicting the hideous influence of two dead and evil servants, Peter Quint and the governess, Miss Jessel, over a small boy and girl who had been under their care. James is perhaps too diffuse, too unctuously urbane, and too much addicted to subtleties of speech to realise fully all the wild and devastating horror in his situations; but for all that there is a rare and mounting tide of fright... which gives the novelette a permanent place in its special class.

H. P. Lovecraft
Supernatural Horror in Literature
1927

I read The Golden Bowl, which for me was okay but not great. I've had Washington Square recommended to me as the most accessible of his books.

(Jamesʻs) . . .subtleties of speech" -- Lovecraft (12)

In fairness to James, I donʻt think he was "addicted to subtleties of speech". He was of far too earnest a temperament for that. Thereʻs a difference between a piece of proseʻs being intentionally "subtle" and its being widely misunderstood or deemed incomprehensible by the reader.
Jamesʻs earnestness was itself an element of his difficult writing
style. In his later works, the really abstruse ones, he was no
longer paying attention to how a passage would look on a page, but only to how it sounded to him as he read it to himself. And it was
in his regular speaking style. The reader was entitled to that style, he figured, and it had to be only as clear as it was to the author.
So, it was in his regular speaking style, and you, the reader, were getting no better and no worse than his listeners would get
in a long Jamesian conversational bit. I believe that where abstruseness came in was with Jamesʻs awareness of how many-sided many a situation is. And he felt obliged to pass that on for the readerʻs enlightenment.

>14 rolandperkins:

Fair enough, Roland. I guess the question that springs to mind when I read James is one that the critic Langdon Winner has asked when attempting to parse the work of the avant-garde rock performer Captain Beefheart: what limit is there to how much an artist can rightfully demand of his or her audience? When I am able to sit down in a perfectly quiet room uninterrupted for a considerable period of time and work my way through James' fiction, I can see that there is genius there; in fact, I would say his work rivals that Herman Melville's in terms of its depth and complexity, which is not a compliment I give out lightly. The source of my frustration lies in the fact that, particularly as I grow older and my responsibilities increase, the moments in which I am able to devote that kind of concentration to an author become fewer and farther between. James' work was probably not as problematic to readers who were his contemporaries, as life then was generally not as hectic or fraught with interruptions as it is now, but to a 21st century reader (e.g., me) his work seems to be increasingly inaccessible.

While the debate rages (for 15 messages, including my own), i'll throw in another question: How do you feel that James compares as an author to Thomas Hardy (of whom i'm fond and Charles Dickens (of whom i'm not fond but admittedly have read little...thereof. Apologies for syntax).

I'll accept responses in context of accessibility, quality of writing or any other yardstick.

It's dangerous ground to tread on, trying to strictly compare authors. We can say whom we prefer (and relatively few will point to Henry James), but where opinions are concerned only yours is going to count. I would say that a key to appreciating any one of the three (or any other author) to the greatest extent possible is to understand their aims and strengths. If I can take the liberty of saying Shakespeare was a master of the technical, dramatic and tragic, then each of these three authors is his heir in one of those three aspects.

Henry James wanted to maximize expression of the illusion of reality, and felt the best approach was to portray fine minds in bewildering circumstances (thank you, Rhetoric of Fiction.) He had his own unique sense of the right and wrong way to go about it and was extremely technical in his approach, whatever his subject.

Charles Dickens took a much lighter hand technically, and was interesting mostly in exploring and portraying characters. Read the Pickwick Papers for an example of fabulously drawn characters wandering about in a story with very little plot. He's very accessible and fun, incorporated wonderful social commentary, but he didn't set out to push the boundaries of authors' literary toolbox. Of these three, I'd call him the most Shakespearean dramatically.

Thomas Hardy I can't speak to as well, but I feel he had a cynicism chip on his shoulder and wasn't afraid to share it - about the futility of believing we have free will, we're all victims of fate, etc. I'm not personally fond of him because of that, but Shakespeare might admire his flare for tragedy.

I pick Hardy over James for his evocation of place. I pick Dickens over James for plot, characterization and humor. I pick both over James for readability.

Thanks everybody, appreciate the feedback. I've started The Portrait of a Lady

>19 MrAndrew:

Please let us know what you think, MrAndrew.

Be careful what you wish for.

>21 MrAndrew:

:D