Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century
by Annette Ferran
Henry
James
Annette
Ferran lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and works in Philadelphia as an
editor for a medical publisher.
She is also an editorial assistant for 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.
It’s
August, mid-summer, and thoughts naturally turn to beach reading. May I suggest a Henry James novel? Three of them appear on the Modern
Library’s list: The Wings of
the Dove
(#26), The Ambassadors (#27), and The Golden Bowl (#32).
Each
of these novels is satisfyingly plump, both in page count and in plot
density. They are full of good
people behaving badly, suspect people rising unexpectedly to the occasion,
people keeping or losing their dignity, people falling in and out of love, people
struggling against the mores of their times. In other words, they are stuffed full of humanity. James’s great strength as a writer is
his insight into the psychological and emotional nuances attendant on all human
interaction. This insight plus the
complex plots and often exotic locales are what make these novels great
candidates for vacation reading, when time is abundant.
Henry
James wrote most of his novels in the 19th century. These three were published in the very early years of the
20th century and therefore make the list, but although James is considered a
modern writer, in many ways he is not a 20th century writer. The First World War dramatically
shifted the culture, ethos, and worldview of the Anglo-European-American world,
and this is starkly demonstrated in all aspects of art in the years immediately
following. The era preceding and the era following WWI do not belong to the
same time.
The
Modern Library’s decision to follow strict dates for their list provides a
great opportunity to enjoy James alongside the more iconic writers of the 20th
century, such as Hemingway.
“Enjoy” is the salient word. These stories are luxurious. You’ll find none of the slim
incisiveness, the barely stated emotionality, the absence of authorial judgment
that define the style of writing just a few years later. You’ll find instead
richly painted locales of privilege and people passing minutely through their
thoughts and feelings. (James’s
characters are all of the privileged classes, even if many of them are
destitute and hiding their poverty-stricken state.) Layered on this, however, is the propriety of the times that
lends the writing an opacity that is odd to readers a century later. When you’re used to reading about body
parts coming together, it is sometimes difficult to understand what is
happening on the page of a James novel, until a baby shows up or a divorce is
granted.
These
stories are by no means prudish or moralistic. They are simply swathed at times in euphemism. Look at the plots of the three novels
that make the list:
In
The Wings of the Dove, a young woman is dedicated to her father, who is some sort
of reprobate but a loving father nevertheless, despite the fact that an aunt
has promised her family riches if she renounces him. In addition, she is in
love with a young man who is considered unsuitable and whom she has to meet on
the sly. She meets up with another young woman who is traveling with an older
companion (female) and who may or may not be deathly ill. Various older females
are contriving to make matches among these two young women and an assortment of
young men, the aim being “suitable” and financially beneficial matches, to the
exclusion of considerations of love.
In The Ambassadors, an American man is
dispatched by a family friend to England with the job of tracking down and
bringing home the family’s son, who is expected to take over the family
business but instead is rumored to have taken up with an unsuitable woman. On
arrival, our American protagonist finds that the young man in question is
keeping company with an older woman and her daughter and for much of the story
it is unclear which of the women he is romantically involved with. Meanwhile, the first man gets involved
with a woman himself and also with the romance of life abroad, freed from the
responsibilities of life back home.
In The Golden Bowl, an Italian nobleman
with no money is slated to marry the daughter of an extremely wealthy American
in London. The trouble is, he chances to meet another young American woman with
whom he’d had a romantic connection some years earlier. The first young woman convinces her
father (a widower) that he, the father, should marry the second young
woman. This sets up a double or
perhaps triple triangle as the Italian and the second young woman remain
connected, and each sees their respective spouses (the daughter and the father)
as more connected to each other than to their mates. Meanwhile the daughter
becomes jealous of the friendship between her husband and her father’s wife and
works to keep the two of them apart while also protecting her father from
knowledge of the whole thing.
Themes and motifs that run through these stories
are cross-generational relationships and relationships between friends and
relatives that are stronger than those of romance or marriage; the unfortunate
state of women of a certain class, who must be suitably married to have any
standing in society; and the perceived differences in morality between American
society and European society (the latter seen as looser in this era). The characters are always struggling
with what they should do versus what they want to do, and they are
inevitably surrounded by meddling people who represent the “should” and
enticing people who represent the “want.”
The female characters stand out.
They seem to be the pivot around which these conflicts swing, as would
be expected given the tidal shift in the status of women that was underway
across the late 19th and early 20th century.
Many people, even avid readers, find Henry James
difficult to read. The wordiness
and the obscurity of his work lend to this impression. These novels are not quick reads. They are decidedly slow reads. But given a long summer day, a cooler
full of snacks and drinks, a nice breeze off the ocean, and plenty of
sunscreen, the travails and intrigues of our heroes and heroines, scoundrels
and charmers, hapless innocents and blooming beauties can be the perfect
entertainment.
