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Garth Greenwell on Henry James's The Golden Bowl

Episode 1

A Romp, Dictated

Featuring Garth Greenwell

Audio episode · 16 min

Garth Greenwell on The Golden Bowl

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.

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Read Deeper

Who Is Maggie Verver, and Why Does Everyone Underestimate Her?

Garth Greenwell reads Maggie Verver as James's great deception: taken for an innocent, she outthinks everyone and wins by choosing the scapegoat's part.

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The Price of Knowing: James, Wharton, and the Women Who See Everything

Maggie Verver and May Welland are the real intelligences of their novels. Greenwell and Gay part on what each does with knowledge: reconstruction or control.

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Why Is The Golden Bowl So Difficult?

James's difficulty has nameable sources — blended precision, drifting pronouns, dictated syntax, withheld knowledge — and Greenwell calls it the engine, not a flaw.

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Is The Golden Bowl Actually a Romp?

The Golden Bowl (1904) is Henry James's novel of a double marriage, an adultery, and the choice not to know — and, Greenwell argues, his juiciest romp.

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