with commentary by Garth Greenwell
I met The Golden Bowl as a movie. I was barely 16 when the Merchant Ivory adaptation came out in 2000, at the tail end of that strange run when Hollywood kept handing the multiplex to literature: Great Expectations relocated to Florida, Shakespeare in Love winning Best Picture, corsets and long looks everywhere. In my defense, I didn't know the film was a novel. I just knew that something in its hushed, gilded unhappiness stuck with me, and that a door labeled Henry James had been propped open without my noticing.
The novel found me a few years later, sideways, in a bookstore. After college I worked as a bookseller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I started noticing a pattern at the register: people came in, almost daily it seemed, to buy Henry James. Then they came back a few weeks later for another James. Then another. Cambridge, it turned out, harbored a whole quiet sub-community of obsessive, totalist James readers, working through him the way some people work through mountain ranges. And the book they all seemed to be preparing themselves for, the one they saved, was this one.
The Golden Bowl is never the first James on anyone's tongue. But once someone actually enters the world of his novels, this becomes the pinnacle. I sold the copies. I wanted to know: what is inside this book that makes it that, even within James?
Garth Greenwell has the answer, and his Rebind commentary spends its whole length delivering it. Greenwell is a novelist with his own reputation for consciousness-saturated sentences, and a onetime opera singer who reads with his ear, and his opening move is to call the book's fearsome reputation exactly backwards. The Golden Bowl, James's last completed novel, "has a reputation for being one of the more difficult novels, not just of James's career, but also in the English novel writing tradition." Greenwell's correction: "It's really a romp... it's actually full of plot. It's as packed with plot and incident as any telenovela. It's maybe James's juiciest novel."
An adultery plot, two arranged marriages, a father and daughter too close for anyone's comfort, and a secret held by exactly the three people who shouldn't hold it.
Then there's the style the reputation is really about, and here Greenwell tells the story that reframed it for me. Mid-career, worn down by decades of earning his living by the pen, James developed a repetitive stress injury; writing by hand became painful. So for the last stretch of his career he hired a secretary and composed his novels out loud. The famous late style is, literally, spoken: "it can give it the sense, which I find very pleasurable, of a kind of oral chatty quality."
Greenwell maps the poles of American prose with Ernest Hemingway at one end and James at the other: "if you can say something with five words, James will try to use 50. He likes elaboration." He's honest about the cost, the pronouns that drift loose from their owners until "finally it's just impossible to know what a pronoun like it is referring to. And there is no question that this can get annoying."
But then comes the claim the whole commentary stands on, the one that tells you why the difficulty is the point:
"James's style, which I think is one of the extraordinary accomplishments of Western literature, is an attempt to find a way that can be adequate to his sense of how slippery human beings are and human meaning is." — Garth Greenwell
I've been circling that idea my entire writing life: the conviction that language is supposed to carry meaning cleanly between people and almost never does, and that the value lives in the attempt anyway. James is the maximal version of the attempt. Fifty words where five would do, because five would be a lie about what it's actually like inside a moment between two people.
Which is why this book sits where it does in literary history. The Golden Bowl arrived in 1904, at the exact turn when the novel was turning inward: Marcel Proust a decade from Swann's Way, Virginia Woolf still to come, and the phrase for what they were all reaching toward, "stream of consciousness," coined, as Greenwell reminds us, "by Henry James's brother, William James, the great philosopher and psychologist." One brother named the current; the other built a novel that swims in it.
Greenwell contrasts James with George Eliot's godlike omniscience: in this book nobody, including the narrator, knows everything. We move from one consciousness to the next, each partial, each straining. "James is the great psychologist of certainly English literature, but really of literature," Greenwell says. "Maybe Proust stands beside him."
And the book's boldest stroke is structural. For more than 300 pages, across four years of story, James locks us out of the mind of Maggie Verver, the wronged wife at the novel's center. Greenwell calls the lockout "remarkably disciplined," and the payoff enormous: when Volume Two opens and we finally enter her, the book turns in your hands.
Maggie surveys her own life as a garden with a strange porcelain pagoda at its center, a structure she has never been inside, and begins to wake. James hands her the novel's real law: "any deep-seated passion has its pains as well as its joys, and... we are made by its aches and its anxieties most richly conscious of it." What James loves in a character, Greenwell says, is exactly that: "a rich consciousness." Suffering, in this book, is how consciousness gets rich.
Two more of Greenwell's claims complete the case. First: this is "a book without villains," which is why he calls it "probably my favorite novel, nine days out of 10." Every character betrays someone; no one is dismissible. Charlotte Stant, the adulteress, spends what Greenwell calls "the strangest proposal scene in all of literature" honorably trying to warn the man she can't be honest with, and he weeps, at his own proposal, thinking of his daughter. Greenwell's margin note: "A red flag."
Second: the legend of James as a celibate of letters, too fastidious for desire, is absurd. Page one gives us the Prince eyeing women on a London street, doing what Greenwell may be the first James reader willing to name: cruising. At the Matcham house party the imagery's "volume dial is turned all the way up," and late in the book James gives Maggie the sentence Greenwell calls him at his most passionate, five verbs long: "he was so near now, that she could touch him, taste him, smell him, kiss him, hold him." A novelist of desire, reading the supposed prude, and finding the temperature was there all along.
That's what was inside the book the Cambridge readers were saving for last: the juiciest plot in James, told in sentences built to be adequate to how slippery we are, structured as an experiment in when a consciousness gets switched on, peopled entirely by humans it refuses to let you dismiss. They trained for years to be ready for it. You have something they didn't: a guide who has already made the climb, who loves the mountain too much to pretend it's flat, and who keeps insisting, correctly, that the view is a pleasure the whole way up.
I was barely 16, watching the movie, not knowing there was a novel underneath. There's always a novel underneath. This is the one.