The Master [Paperback]

When the novel opens in 1895, James's play, Guy Domville, has been booed on its opening night. James, now fifty-two, has hoped for a career as a playwright, believing success on stage will put an end to "his long solitary days" and allow him to spend more time among actors, whom he finds fascinating. Described as "a great stranger...observing the world as a mere watcher from the window," James is a lonely, solitary figure throughout the novel, a man unable to form a committed relationship with anyone, either male or female, sometimes wanting companionship but not closeness, and always needing solitude to work. Through flashbacks, Toibin shows how James's early upbringing may have been partly responsible for his feelings of isolation.

When James begins writing his stories and novels, he draws inspiration from the people he knows best and the events which have affected their lives and his own. His sister Alice is the model for a child in The Turn of the Screw, his cousin Minny Temple is the inspiration for several of his most important female characters-in "Poor Richard," Daisy Miller, and Portrait of a Lady--and his brother Wilky's wounds in the Civil War provide James with details he includes in other stories. Virtually every aspect of James's life works its way into a story, and as he gets inside the psyches of his characters through his fiction, he reveals his own psyche, his sympathies, and his personal conflicts.

Toibin's dual focus on James's life and its embodiment in his fiction give powerful immediacy and verisimilitude to this novel, and one cannot help but feel an emotional connection to James. His connections to great families and writers whose names are well known, and to people willing to accept James completely on his own terms provide Toibin with unlimited source material. It is Toibin's own talents in ordering this information, bringing it to life, and revealing its importance, however, which make this masterful novel so important. Mary Whipple

Complex and emotional, the narrative, at once, centers on James' life in England, where he reflects, with a sense of wistful regret, on his childhood growing up in Newport and Boston, where ideas were sacred, second only to good manners, and where there was a pull between "an ordered community who knew god and an idealism." Henry's father was an unconventional independently wealthy philosopher and religiously imaginative. Henrys older brother William was the first American psychologist of notable status and was also a very astute and influential philosopher. Consequently, Henry and his siblings were constantly exposed to museums, libraries, theaters and art galleries. Henry's time abroad gave him a mastery of the French language suitable enough to get him started in the study of its literature.

Toibin's focuses on a period called "the treacherous years" when as the nineteenth century waned, and the influence of Victorianism diminished, the giant of American letters, then in his 50s, was trying to reinvent himself as a playwright. James did not feel at home in America, Europe, his profession, or his own skin. Drawing on a combination of rigorous fidelity and intelligent guesswork – Toibin recreates James' platonic relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, his adolescent attraction to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and his surreptitious crush on the young artist Hendrick Anderson. The reader witnesses the events of James' life before he wrote his final masterpieces. Toibin beautifully portrays an elegant world of Edwardian drawing rooms, lavish parlors, slowly burning candles, and masked balls. James feels the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he is alone, and an outsider. He is far too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed the morals to be able to participate.

The Master is a graceful, terribly sad story of a lonely, introverted homosexual fated to spend his life almost connecting, staring through parlor windows, and recording with crystalline exactitude the minute struggles of the societies that surrounded him. From his apartment in Kensington, to his self-imposed seclusion in Lamb House, Rye, all he hears is the "vague cry in the distance, of his own great solitude." As he writes, his memory works like grief, the past coming to him with its arm outstretched looking for comfort. Toibin's achievement - the depiction of James that is in all its nuance, detail and tenderness, totally Jamesian - is absolutely extraordinary. Mike Leonard May 04.