Cruising and the Coin

The Golden Bowl opens with a prince on a London street, looking at women. Garth Greenwell knows the name for what this man is doing, and he may be the first reader of Henry James willing to use it. The rest of the chapter runs colder. The wedding has been planned like a merger, the groom keeps thinking about his father-in-law, and at the chapter's end the Prince pictures himself as an old gold coin dug out of the ground and put behind glass. What does it cost a man to be bought at a price he never learns? Greenwell opens the novel by opening that question.