The Awkward Age (1899)

I read this years ago, but rereading it now, I see that I made nothing of it at the time. THIS time, going very carefully, making sure not to get lost in the intricate layers of the dialogue, I found an extraordinary, extraordinarily sad story, whose young heroine's coming of age consists not in moving into adulthood but in assuming moral and emotional responsibility for her own parents -- who never parented her and whose parent she herself becomes -- and the man she continues to love even when his utter worthlessness is made most clear to her.

I couldn't help reading this in light of what a contemporary therapist would make of it all, it's such a perfect presentation, in the guise of a drawing-room/countryhouse novel of manners, of what happens when children are forced to maturity too early, and find themselves relied on and betrayed by those they should most trust to be protecting and launching them into adult life.

The story here feels at first like one that's entirely of its time -- it's just before the turn of the 20th century; London manners and mores are in flux, and the problem is how, in a "fast" circle of friends, a mother can bring her unmarried daughter into the drawing room without expurgating the talk. The solution that everyone seems to feel is right is to marry the daughter off. Much is made of the kind of innocence girls were brought up to in the past, and how that innocence is being fast eroded in the last decades of the 19th century.
But the innocence James is really writing about, the innocence and experience -- are completely contemporary, or timeless.

I want also to convey that this book is great fun to read. It DOES require a lot of attention; if your mind wanders for a second, you're lost. Its best effects are missed if you don't bear down. James always writes for the really attentive careful reader (I realize I'm complimenting myself here, but why the fuck not), and with every easter egg you find in the grass as you go along, the rewards feel greater and greater. James' prose to me always has a crunchy-chewy feel to it that I find myself craving, and than which no other writer can be substituted when the craving hits.

This probably isn't the book to start off reading James with, but this, along with "What Maisie Knew", may be my two secret favorites, in that they're part of his oeuvre that are often overlooked between the triumph of "A Portrait" and those three late heavy-weight novels that are so praised and which it took me years of "training" to be able to read and understand -- only in the last 3 years, after decades of circling back to them and falling off. ( )

Another great plot and unreadable book from Henry James. Why are all his books like that? Great stories... but reading it is like hiking through waist-deep mud. The story of Nanda, a young debutante who isn't quite an innocent as she's supposed to be.