Henry James (review)

296 The Henry James Review satisfaction." Greenwald's interest in James's later phase and Üie theory of romance (which she acknowledges has been influenced by Richard Brodhead, her former teacher at Yale) frequently proves stimulating. Irrespective of whether one agrees with all of Greenwald's assertions, there is no doubt üiat she writes intelligently, and widi patience, care, and sensitive perception. Robert Emmet Long Fulton, New York Alan W. Bellringer. Henry James. Modern Novelists Series. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. 155 pp. $24.95. Alan Bellringer's Henry James joins Norman Page's E. M. Forster, Ruth Whittaker's Doris Lessing, and Peter Conradi's Fyodor Dostoevsky in St. Martin's Press's growing Modem Novelists series. These studies serve as introductions to the lives, works, and critical assessments of major novelists and are designed for the general reader who desires a quick overview or review of a writer's career and works. In preparing such a volume on Henry James, Bellringer has done well, making generalizations about a complex life and a complex corpus of works within die small compass of 150 pages widiout sounding encyclopedic or trite. The structure of the book is predictable. The first and last chapters are expository; the first provides a biographical sketch of James and the last assesses his critical fortunes over die years and provides a broad bibliographic survey of James studies. The intervening five chapters provide, in chronological order, a critical analysis of fifteen of James's best known works. Carefully balancing stories and novels, Bellringer quickly summarizes the plots and dien evaluates die works in die context of James's development and career. The most popular James pieces (particularly those read most often by students) are here— Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, What Maisie Knew, The Portrait of a Lady, "The Beast in die Jungle"—and a precise balance of early, middle, and late James is maintained. In short, Bellringer keeps control of his material and presents a concise, summarily efficient work. Such a description may make this book sound predictable and flat, but it is not. Within the limitations of his assigned task, Bellringer's lively, informed voice manages to retain our attention and interest. Throughout, die work reflects his detailed knowledge of James's works and Jamesian scholarship. He conscientiously attempts to put James within the larger context of literary history by frequent allusions to those he sees as influencing James (particularly Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert) and to those widi whom James has certain affinities (Tolstoy, Dickens, Hawthorne, Austen, and Shakespeare, to mention a few). In discussing such standard issues as James's favorite themes (internationalism, the artistic temperament, inner versus outer reality), his use of ambiguity, his prolix style, and his psychological realism, Bellringer conveys an audioritative certitude attractive to the uninitiated reader of James. Bellringer demonstrates a knack for quick assessment and summary criticism. For example, in analyzing James's choice of the narrator in The American, Bellringer states: "The problem arises from James's choice of so unfamiliar, uprooted a type as botii subject and object, as a vehicle for sophisticated observation and as someone who is peculiarly limited. The problems posed in The American by the dubious status of die hero and the melodramatic nature of die plot are solved in subsequent novels in various ways; partly by making the observer-figure literary, young or female and partly by confining the sensational interpretations of die incidents to minor characters given to exaggerating everything" (37). Book Reviews 297 He unhesitatingly pronounces general truths about the man as weU as his works. Of James's sexuality he says, "James was not undersexed, but he was too imaginatively curious about both sexes to be vulnerably bisexual himself, too devoted to work to let love put him off, and too keen to assimilate everyone else's experience to risk letting his writing suffer from absorption in his own personal relationships" (11). At points such certitude about James's motivations and reasoning suggests oversimplification, but such is the temptation, and often the necessity, in general, summary studies. This skill in assertive summary statement is more often an asset than a liability for...