Nathaniel 's Reviews > The Golden Bowl

Good Lord, do I hate this book.

This is very, very late Henry James, when he was hopped up on painkillers and "writing" his novels via dictaphone. Consequently, the entire book reads like a very, very long, barely edited transcript of a dying Victorian intellectual rambling incoherently for hours in turn of the century English, because that's exactly what it is. The narrative is simplistic, is buried underneath clouds of irrelevant and soporific detail, and frankly isn't very interesting to begin with. The characters are wooden and uninteresting. The entire book is less about actual storytelling and more about talking at great length about arcane Victorian traditions without actually getting to the point. For all of the thousands of words in this book, very few of them actually have meaning. This book adds nothing to either literature in general or to James's reputation, and only came to be because he was delirious and lonely at the end of his life and wanted to write one last epic novel despite being physically incapable of doing so. Even so, he should have let it die when it became obvious he couldn't do it properly. Actually publishing this turgid mess as a novel was a crime against humanity. Avoid this one at all costs unless you're a very, very, very patient masochist, or you're too pretentious to realize how absolutely awful this book really is.