A Book Without Villains

Garth Greenwell calls The Golden Bowl the novel he loves best, and this episode carries his reason: it is a book, he argues, without a single villain. The test case is a proposal. Adam Verver, one of the richest men alive, asks Charlotte Stant to marry him, and Charlotte, who cannot tell him the one thing that matters most, warns him every other way she knows. He hears none of it. Then comes the acceptance, which is stranger still: a look Adam misreads, tears that fall for someone else, and a telegram he declines to read. The episode ends on that telegram.