Review: The Wings of the Dove

The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Henry James, why do I have such a love-hate relationship with your words? Why does it take so many of them to describe simple things like what two people said to each other last night? Why do I feel like I still don't have a handle on what happened even though I literally just read what happened? Why am I such a masochist? (Don't answer that.)

If Hemingway is the master of icebergs (leaving many things hidden under the surface of what's spoken), James is the master of... showing many things including what's hidden under the surface, but leaving you confused anyway. Because it turns out that what was hidden was just a long sequence of words that stretch the definition of what a paragraph (let alone a sentence) is, which is probably meant to be something tangible but I'm also probably too much of a fool to see it. Trying to grasp the meanings of James' language is like trying to hold onto a cloud.

And then whenever people actually do talk in dialogue, it's only to make statements like:

She's magnificent.

She's prodigious.

She's an actual person.

She's a dove.

Only to have to bang your head against the pages trying to answer, what do these people even mean???

I think that captures the gist of what it feels like to read this.

Oh also the villains of this book are not the type of people I expected them to be (if I were to summarize the latter half I would call it "what happens when you suddenly realize you have morals and agency") so kudos to James for that. Although I would've preferred less of Merton and more of Kate.