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THE UNCOLLECTED HENRY JAMES

Name: THE UNCOLLECTED HENRY JAMES
Author: Floyd R. Horowitz
ISBN: 0-7867-1272-4

NEWLY DISCOVERED STORIES

edited by Floyd R. Horowitz ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2004

Still, the tenacious reader alone will have to determine whether and which of these frothy stories is really the work of the...

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Twenty-four stories, newly attributed to the young Henry James although unsigned by him, range from the slight and sentimental to the pleasingly melodramatic.

For over two decades, editor Horowitz, a retired professor of English and computer science, has ferreted out anonymous or pseudonymous stories from the magazines of James’s time and put them through a series of computer tests, focusing on repeated uses of particular words and phrases. The resulting selections, beginning in the year James turned 10 and ending when he was 26, are sometimes rough and sometimes charming, but they never display the psychological acuity, moral perceptiveness, or rigorous “point of view” of James’s signed work. The storylines tend to revolve around obstacles to young love, and they tend to the insipid. In “The Pair of Slippers” and “The Rainy Day,” an omniscient narrator tells of a privileged but thoughtless young woman who performs an act of charity, is transformed, and wins the man she has been pining for. In “Breach of Promise of Marriage,” an heiress named Belle, the houseguest of an old school friend and the friend’s husband (the story’s narrator), becomes caught in her own seductive snare when she falls in love with a poor boy she has been flirting with. In one of the more entertaining tales, “A Hasty Marriage,” a beautiful and well-bred but penniless narrator reenacts the fate of Beauty in “Beauty and the Beast”; in a fit of pride during a game of charades at an elegant house party, she actually marries the rich but ugly stranger who turns out to be kinder and nobler than her handsome long-time suitor. In prefaces to these pieces and others, the editor suggests correspondences to later work and evidence of James-family Swedenborgian precepts that he believes seal the identification of the author.

Still, the tenacious reader alone will have to determine whether and which of these frothy stories is really the work of the great Henry James.

Pub Date: March 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-7867-1272-4

Page Count: 336

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOLDFINCH
by Donna Tartt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE FRIEND
by Donna Tartt

- SEEN & HEARD
Podcast Will Explore Bennington College Lit Trio

- SEEN & HEARD
‘The Secret History’ Is New ‘Today’ Book Club Pick

- SEEN & HEARD
Jenna Bush Hager Launching Author Podcast

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.