A Church in the Square

The richest man in the world is hiding behind a billiard table from a woman who means to marry him. So opens Book Second of Henry James's The Golden Bowl, and so begins the novel's first long visit to Adam Verver's mind. Garth Greenwell takes up the figure Adam finds for his daughter's marriage, a grand church set down in a quiet square where nothing, somehow, has to move, and asks the question Adam never asks himself: what kind of marriage changes nothing? Then the family comes home from church, Maggie sees her father plainly, and James sets off the quietest explosion in the book.