The Sentence Factory

An episode with no plot in it, on purpose. Garth Greenwell picks one sentence from the first chapter of Henry James's The Golden Bowl, a sentence he loves without being sure what it means, and takes it apart to show you how James builds: what makes the sentence stand, what lets it sprawl, and where a joke hides in its three smallest words. Then he answers the question every reader of late James eventually asks: do you really have to work this hard? His answer is a relief. There are two ways to read this prose, and both of them are allowed.