The Best Marriage in James

The Golden Bowl runs on two glamorous marriages, both arranged, both in trouble. Garth Greenwell thinks the best marriage in all of Henry James is hiding in its comic relief: Fanny Assingham, who cannot stop theorizing about her friends, and her Colonel, who swears he wants none of it. Before the book crosses into Maggie's half, Greenwell stops to make their case. He finds it first in a single sentence, a joke about married talk that turns, one clause later, into something much finer. Then he follows them home on the worst night of Fanny's meddling life, out to the edge of the strangest lake in James.