James’s relentless work habits produced a frequently stunning oeuvre. His biographer’s focus on the novelist’s daily rounds...
This sequel to Henry James: The Young Master (1996, etc.) chronicles, in numbingly Jamesian detail, the expatriate writer’s attempt, in his social life and his work, to create a venue for “large & confident action—splendid & supreme creation.”
Novick (Law and History/Vermont Law School) follows the novelist from 1881, after The Portrait of a Lady was published, to his death in 1916, when he was hailed as a modernist master who introduced into fiction the notion of the observer’s consciousness. While covering relations with family members such as older brother William, the philosopher, Novick justifiably spends more time on James’s cosmopolitan circle of artists and their aristocratic mentors, who crossed national and sexual boundaries. This group heightened his tendency toward painting tableaux rather than telling tales, while leaving him out of step with both middle-aged women, who formed the major readership of literary fiction, and London theatergoers, who rejected him in his mid-career attempt to write successful dramas. James could not have asked for a more sympathetic biographer. Novick is tolerant of his homosexuality, sensitive to his battles with contemporary tastes and absolutely admiring of his achievements. If anything, the author is too sympathetic to his subject. His explanation of James’s prejudices, for instance, nearly becomes exculpatory: “There is not a great deal of difference, in the end, between his view of roles as realities that must be accepted, and the very modern view that while real, they are socially constructed.” Nor is he above the occasional gaffe—if James met Evelyn Waugh, as claimed, the latter could not have been a “young writer” yet, as he had only been born a few years before this encounter. Novick is on surer ground in explaining the stylistically dense, psychologically rich fiction James created in his last, major phase: The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl.
James’s relentless work habits produced a frequently stunning oeuvre. His biographer’s focus on the novelist’s daily rounds in an otherwise quiet life is just as relentless and demanding, but far less artful.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-679-45023-8
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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