A Romp, Dictated

Henry James's The Golden Bowl has a reputation as the hardest novel in English, the one even devoted readers put off for a rainy decade. Garth Greenwell has lived with this book for years, as a novelist and as a onetime opera singer who reads with his ear, and he thinks its reputation gets it almost exactly backwards. First he lays out what The Golden Bowl actually contains, which is more scandal than most bookshelves suspect. Then he tells the strange, physical story of how James came to write the way he wrote. The style, it turns out, has a body behind it.