The Awkward Age

If you are not prepared to read several scenes in this novel slowly and often, there is a very good chance that, like many academic reviewers, you will leave it thinking less well of the characters in it than you do of yourself for having, with only moderate encouragement from James, "seen through them." Not many of them are easy to like. Mrs. Brook in particular is, as James clearly implies in his preface to the New York edition, essentially a character in a French novel--charming, beautiful, terminally manipulative. But the pleasure of this book is precisely that it obliges you, by the precise obliquity of its writing, to recurively correct your notions as you move through a series of set scenes, transferring your allegiances as characters initially attractive come to seem less so, and as characters less attractive come, by their honesty or their helplessness, to the moral fore. The long scene at Tishy Grendon's, in which everything comes to a kind of moral head, craves such careful reading that even inveterately fascinated and loyalist readers of James will need to piece their way through it very slowly. Critics and readers who, understandably, wonder why all this fuss is made about people themselves ultimately trivial, need to be reminded that James spent his life as a writer teaching us, by the difficulty of his writing, to read (in just the same way that Bach teaches us to listen). It is "the fascination of what's difficult" that keeps us turning pages, though it must be said that what's difficult here is considerably less so than, say, in The Golden Bowl or The Wings Of The Dove. Ultimately, what is upheld in these novels is the willingness, in a world riddled with well bred rottenness, evil in spotless linen, to live without self pity or bitterness, and for this alone James should be required reading for Americans of the 21st Century.

This novel tells a familiar tale: old-fashioned man enters a tangled web of wealthy British fashionable types, makes a proposal, and the web falls apart. Mr. Longdon, a wealthy old man from Suffolk, returns to London to find the children and grandchildren of his ancient love. Out of respect for this unspoiled affection, he takes an interest in the grand-daughter of his love and tries to pull her out of the circle of influence that has, effectively, soiled her. James manages some interesting and convincing characters, and these pawns interact in some magnificent scenes. It almost reminds me of Restoration Comedy, with its complicated dialogue and dramatic jumps in setting that resemble staged scenes. The major thread of the novel is the relationship between Vanderbank, a complicated but good-natured young man who has managed to penetrate that affluent circle, and Nanda Brookenham, the granddaughter of Longdon's lost love. Vanderbank remains deliciously puzzling to the end of the novel, and Nanda manages a kind of heroism. The conclusion is somewhat surprising; James, by this point in his career, seems to have moved beyond the endorsement of conservative values evident in a work like The Bostonians. Despite the surprise, though, it was a great deal of fun getting to that conclusion. This novel is as close to a page-turner as I have read from James thus far, and bristles with subtle interrogation of a rotting social structure. I have no trouble saying, like F.R. Leavis, that this novel ranks among James's best.

The Everyman edition on which I base my review is a handsome addition to a shelf. Hardbound in warm red covers, the author's name and the novels title emblazoned on front and spine in gold on black, the edition contains not only the eminent novel but an astute introduction by Cynthia Ozick herself a novelist and an afterword (originally a preface) by the master himself. These three gems are offered at a price half the sum many current writers get for what may be proved less memorable works. The very title exhibits James intricate approach to fiction. It could apply to Nanda the eighteen year old whose mother Mrs. Brooks is seeking a marriage both socially and financially beneficial. A second candidate is Mr. Longdon once a suitor of Mrs. Brook's mother and who find in Nanda a similar energy and charm. Too young to have passed away along with the era in which his fondest memories lie, too old to qualify as anything but a surrogate parent and benefactor to Nannda, he remains a epitome of the title. Lastly, the historical period in which the novel is set, part of James timeline, could be taken as an arkward age. Prior notions of 'proper' feminity are being challenged by newer ideals. Whatever the application, a transition is involved between innocence and awareness, a frequent subject in James works. Although James novel is influenced by James short stint in play writing , a propencity for longish, convoluted sentences shows now and then: "The speech had for Nanda's companion, however, no effect of pleasantry or irony, and it was a mark of the special intercourse of these good friends that though they had for each other, in manner and tone, such a fund of consideration as might almost have given it the stamp of diplomacy, there was yet in it also something of that economy of expression which is the result of a common experience.. " Longish yes but clear enough to follow. For Henry James the mind is the stage on which drama is played. The mind navigates between what is done to its owner and how it reacts to the event whether the event be in the form of a gesture, dialogue, image, or insight. As much as he is a wizard of the novel of manners so is he of the psychological novel since both types are woven together as in THE ARKWARD AGE.

This is a surprisingly fine novel, so often overlooked, by James. About the usual upper-class Londoners near the turn of the century. In this case, disturbed by the arrival of an acquaintance of the earlier generation, one women in particular, and his effect upon the marital prospects of that woman's granddaughter, with whom he establishes a special relationship. Each person has an agenda, often at complex cross-purposes, filtered through misunderstandings, indirectness in communications, and the hypocrisy of greed and social ambitions. One need only get through James' penchant for the prepositional phrase, and his characters' habit of so seldom saying anything simply and directly. to be rewarded with a rare reading experience.

An absolutely amazing book, and one of the best examples of the qualities that make Henry James unique. What James presents us with is basically a group of people whose fate is already determined on the novel's first page. The entire narrative course of the book consists of the schemes and rationalizations these characters put together in a series of unsuccessful attempts to alter or deny their various fates. A beautiful instance of the idea that language, and the fantasies constructed by language, form a "parallel universe" of sorts, which exists both as a reflection of and a divergence from the physical reality in which James' characters exist. Really not to be missed