The Master: A Novel

This book has gotten many detailed rave reviews, and I'll rave about it also, but I'd like to make this a more practical and useful review. I loved the book, but Henry James is one of my favorite authors. I've read several of his novels as well as seen the films and PBS versions. The American is one of my all time favorites. Colm Toibin brings James to life and takes you into his time. I really felt a part of the James family when they were going through the Civil War. He gave me a vivid feeling of the ghastly poverty in 19th century Ireland and the behavior of the English as an occupying army. He takes you from Newport to Boston to Paris to London to Dublin and proves that with good research and ability, an author can write convincingly about a time he never lived in and countries not his own. However, I feel not everybody will find this book as appealing as I did and I'd like to try to save those people some time and money. First, this book is written in the 19th century style, with a slow-moving story, more description and less dialogue and graphic action. After all, life was slower-paced in those days. If you prefer contemporary literature, with a fast-moving plot, you may not care for this book. People who are not familiar with Henry James or haven't read his books may not be interested. The exception is people who are always meaning to read his books, but haven't gotten around to it. This book will be a good introduction for those readers and they can decide which of his novels they want to start with. Finally, there are people that don't like James's writing and I can't see them wanting to read this book. The Master really boils down to each reader's personal taste. I'd recommend it in a heartbeat, but it's a good idea to give some thought to what you like to read.

Focusing on the life of Henry James, Colm Toibin's The Master goes beyond the usual "novelization" of someone's biography. Toibin has done a tremendous amount of research and has obviously read everything James has written, but he has so distilled this information that he actually recreates Henry James. Most remarkably, he does this while using the third person point of view to tell the story, preserving the objective tone but bringing forth characters and events so vibrant with life that Toibin's James is the man we know from his novels, letters, and journals. When the novel opens in 1895, James's play, Guy Domville, has been booed on its opening night. James, now fifty-two, has hoped for a career as a playwright, believing success on stage will put an end to "his long solitary days" and allow him to spend more time among actors, whom he finds fascinating. Described as "a great stranger...observing the world as a mere watcher from the window," James is a lonely, solitary figure throughout the novel, a man unable to form a committed relationship with anyone, either male or female, sometimes wanting companionship but not closeness, and always needing solitude to work. Through flashbacks, Toibin shows how James's early upbringing may have been partly responsible for his feelings of isolation. When James begins writing his stories and novels, he draws inspiration from the people he knows best and the events which have affected their lives and his own. His sister Alice is the model for a child in The Turn of the Screw, his cousin Minny Temple is the inspiration for several of his most important female characters-in "Poor Richard," Daisy Miller, and Portrait of a Lady--and his brother Wilky's wounds in the Civil War provide James with details he includes in other stories. Virtually every aspect of James's life works its way into a story, and as he gets inside the psyches of his characters through his fiction, he reveals his own psyche, his sympathies, and his personal conflicts. Toibin's dual focus on James's life and its embodiment in his fiction give powerful immediacy and verisimilitude to this novel, and one cannot help but feel an emotional connection to James. His connections to great families and writers whose names are well known, and to people willing to accept James completely on his own terms provide Toibin with unlimited source material. It is Toibin's own talents in ordering this information, bringing it to life, and revealing its importance, however, which make this masterful novel so important. Mary Whipple

After giving this book to myself for Christmas, I finally finished it this afternoon, having read, as is usual, the last two hundred pages in two days. It took the three months to read the first hundred pages. The book is a fictionalized biography--it describes itself as a novel but I think it's too close to the truth to be called that--of an aging Henry James living in London and then in Rye, England, and visited by his friends and family. The most wonderful part of the book is the narration of Henry's interior monologue--his acid descriptions of frivolous people at parties, his sensual gazes at young men, especially servants, and, most important, how he forms his characters, his plots, and the situtations and dramas that people his novels and short stories. This last description of the process of writing novels is wonderful, not only because it's very particular to Henry James, but because it's the most precise and feels the most accurate description of the process of writing fiction yet expressed.

I'm not a stranger to James but far from knowledgeable about his life and work, and I picked up this book in hopes of gaining a glimpse inside the man whose novels I have always found somewhat difficult. And Toíbín certainly provides that. Yet a glimpse into a mystery points to more mysteries, and one is left at the end of this novel with a conviction that no creative person - perhaps no person - can ever be really known. There are many ways to read this novel, because there are so many ways Toíbín chooses to reveal James. Fascinating for me was how James' experiences and the people he knew or knew of found their way into his stories and novels. The various threads of real-life drama that weave together into the idea that becomes "The Turn of the Screw," for instance, make an intriguing study. It's doubly interesting that this process is explored by a storyteller gifted in his own right. Toíbín also explores the moral dimension of transforming real lives into fictional ones. He looks rather hard at how James' apparent emotional neglect of the people nearest him didn't prevent him from appropriating their vulnerabilities for his own ends as a writer. We see him as much as abandon those who need him. Then after their deaths, he gives them life again in his stories, where he can control their fates. The ironies of this process double-back on him as he finds himself playing a role in a scene he sees as imagined by a novelist friend who has committed suicide. And again, he recognizes his relationship with a young sculptor as similar to that of two men in a novel he wrote long before - only to discover that his actual life does not take on the narrative shape he has hoped for. Readers eager for revelations about James' sexuality will be disappointed. Toíbín represents James as fiercely defended against anything so inappropriate as erotic attraction between men. Even his estimation of Oscar Wilde, whose plays he dislikes, is based on the man's disregard for the impact of his behavior on his wife and children. In an age when such self-closeting is considered almost pathological, it's hard to accept this portrait as anything but dishonest. But I suspect that it's close to the truth, and the interplay between James' insight into character and motive and blindness to his own adds a dimension to this novel that makes it a richly rewarding read.

Colm Toibin's fine novel THE MASTER is an act of art in and of itself. This is a well-researched biography of one of America's greatest novelists but it is also a novel, a great work of literature that sifts through all the extant data found in the copious letters between Henry James and his brother (the equally famous William James) and others of his family and acquaintances, other biographies, and the vast writings about this extraordinary family . But what Toibin has achieved is more a dissection of the mind of a man who produced so many great books, showing us the gradual development of influences that, once digested, became such great books as 'The Turn of the Screw', 'The Portrait of a Lady', 'Washington Square', etc. THE MASTER opens with the expatriate James' embarrassing failure as a playwright ('Guy Domville') while his compatriot Oscar Wilde is enjoying tremendous success in another nearby London theater. This parallel plays significantly throughout the novel as a point of reference for James' periods of self doubt, fear of his own like sexual longings that ended Wilde's career in a famous trial, his odd transplantation from America to the United Kingdom and Italy, etc. Toibin's novel (by inference of his chapter titles) takes place from 1895 to 1899, but using the flashback and flash forward technique we are privy to the whole history of the James family (the premiere intellectual family in the latter 19th century), Henry's childhood and avoidance of serving in the Civil War, and all of the famous people who surrounded him (and at times slept with him in the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes). In a sensitive way, Toibin addresses the ambiguous sexuality of Henry, touching reverently and yet sensually on his platonic relationships with a manservant Hammond, his houseboy Burgess Noakes in Rye, England, and his magnetic attraction to the Norwegian sculptor Hendrik Andersen. Yet Toibin devotes equal energy to exploring Henry's long-term friendship with the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson who committed suicide in his beloved Venice, his sister Alice who dies young and has a suggested lesbian relationship, Lady Wolseley who decorates his home in Rye, and his own brother William. Along the way are hints and digressions about novels in gestation and in final form. And as if this tome of information weren't enough to satisfy the reader, Toibin writes with such magnificent prose that the book literally sings. "As an artist, he recognized, Andersen might know, or at least fathom the possibility, that each book he had written became an aspect of him, had entered into his driven spirit and lay there much as the years themselves had done. His relationship with Constance would be hard to explain; Andersen was perhaps too young to know how memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determinati