The Wings of the Dove (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

The Wings of the Dove, on Amazon, has an absurdly low rating, much like most of James's other novels. To all readers seriously interested in purchasing a James novel for the first time, I urge you not to be frightened by all the reviews that say something like, "exhausting," "overrated," "flaccid," "unbearable," and so on. It's the eternal critique of James; the readers who find James "unbearable" are simply not meant to read James. They will forever bear a grudge against him, and we can do nothing about that.

If you're approaching James for the first time, know that "The Ambassadors," "The Wings of the Dove," and "The Golden Bowl," often referred to as the novels of his "Major" (late) phase, are his greatest works, but the style of these novels, while full of rewards, is challenging. There's no doubt about that. Use Amazon's "look inside" feature and read a few pages; if you're intrigued, by all means, buy the book. If you're turned off, don't buy the book, at least right now. If you're mystified but still interested, consider reading the books in a different order.

It may be a bad idea to start off your reading of James with "The Wings of the Dove" or "The Golden Bowl." These are works of an artistic genius who has been meditating on some of the same themes, ethical dilemmas, situations, and the representation of changing consciousness for a lifetime. As such, they are prose texts of great complexity, and readers need to expect that a novel written by a reader, writer and thinker of age 60 is rather different from the product of a man of age 35 or 40. Age often brings complexity: by the time we come to W.B. Yeats's last poems, for example, we are simply expected to know a few things about Yeats: Maud Gonne, say, some of his key symbols and poetic forms. I remember hearing Helen Vendler lecture on Yeats's late "Among School Children," she says: "this is a poem of a man, 60, who expects us to tolerate the well-stocked furniture of a 60 year-old mind." "The Wings of the Dove" is a novel of a man, 60, who expects us to tolerate the thorny intellectual and representational crises that have haunted his 60 year-old mind.

If you are interested in reading "The Wings of the Dove," which is a gorgeous novel of severe choice, eros, tragedy and liberation, but you are afraid to jump into the late James, I suggest you train yourself on some of James's earlier texts that are just as great but are a bit more accessible. "The Portrait of a Lady" (1881, written 20 years before "Wings"), is a great place to start; in fact, some consider it James's finest novel. "The American" (1877), though rather imperfect, is also worth looking into. Or you might read some of James's stories - "Daisy Miller: A Study" (1878) - is a thematic precursor of many of his larger novels. (Note: "The Turn of the Screw," (1898) while also great, is great for different reasons. It is a ghost story, and in this phase of his career, James was intrigued by the supernatural. So, while it is a great read, it is not in any obvious way a precursor to something like "The Wings of the Dove").

This is just some advice for new readers who aren't ready to plunge right away along with Kate Croy into the depth of a moral miasma. But if you feel ready, by all means, plunge! It is not for me to explain why you should read "Wings," but if questions of betrayal, knowledge, deception, innocence, experience, desire and transcendence interest you in works of fiction, then, what a lark, what a plunge is this text!

I chose to write a review, not so much to review, but rather explain the shift in narrative style from early to later works. First, I do very much agree with the reviewers who state that James's novels should be read in the order that they were written. His prose through years does become progressively complicated and elusive in style. But James was not playing mind games, as some readers suggest; he was not a modernist writer like Faulkner or Wolfe, though he perhaps paved their way. The fact, however, is that Henry James became increasingly blind with age, and thus began to dictate his novels instead of writing them by hand. The result is writing that becomes much more like a conversation and/or a thought process rather than perfectly clear and punctuated sentences. Whether James cultivated this new style on purpose once he achieved it is unknown. But, the unmistakable result, the reader's entrance into the much more literal mind of his genius, is personally fascinating to me. Readers who are fans of modernist literature will revel in his later novels.

I will say I am disappointed but not surprised that people would say the novel is bad simply because they don't understand it and have made no attempt do so. When I didn't understand The Sound and the Fury the summer I was 17, I went to library and figured it out (more or less)! Perhaps the point is more that this is not a novel for leisure but for the appreciation of art. If you are thus reading this novel to be simply entertained, then it is not for you. It's not an easy read and there are other great and lesser novels which shall better suit your purpose.

In terms of the actual plot I think persevering readers will be enthralled by James's study of motivations and emotions, love and friendship, knowledge and deceit.

Happy reading to those brave men and women, and to those naysayers, I hope you at least now understand the reason for this narrative shift even if you cannot appreciate it.

... to 'read' their characters, I mean, or intentions, and particularly in a scripture, a stricture or structure if you will, of Life as a narrative wherein duplicity and evasion are pervasively 'read' as good breeding and proper manners, so that even those who persuade themselves of intimacy are liable to the misreading of each other's character, not to mention of their own, an ambiguity which is, of course, both the usual modus operandi of Henry James's later fiction - the illegibility, as it were, of each unto each other -and the essential topic of The Wings of the Dove. [It's not so easy to read Henry James, either, as that little parody of his style is intended to demonstrate. 'The Wings of the Dove' is undeniably -- indefensibly, some might say -- a 'difficult' novel. In fact, it's the epitome of what many readers dislike about James's work. It's as difficult, on every level, as anything ever written in English, short perhaps of Finnegan's Wake. The sentences are knottily syntactical, the whole narrative is manipulatively oblique, and the central theme appears to be that any interpretation of persons real or fictional must ineluctably remain provisional until proven wrong.]

The persons are six: the beautiful but penniless Kate Croy; the personable but penniless Merton Densher; Kate's purse-proud and domineering Aunt Maud; Lord Mark, whom I cannot characterize without serving up a 'spoiler'; Milly Teale, an American heiress of ineffable ... well, precisely of what sort of ineffability our author is loath to specify; and Milly's devoted companion Susan Shepherd. Each of them serves, in various portions of the novel, as the interior protagonist, the mind that the author purports to 'read' while perversely withholding any explicit insight. Their mutual deceptions and confidences -- all six of them have wildly inaccurate perceptions of their interrelationships -- remind me strongly of a six-voice polyphonic madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo. replete with false cadences, shockingly dissonant suspensions, and bizarre chromaticisms. It would be a disservice to the reader to summarize the plot of this novel; one is not meant to have a clear sense of its directions, let alone its denouement.

As I said, James withholds. "Withholding" is his strategy, I think, for compelling the reader to experience the 'illegibility' of existence moment by moment. Milly, for instance, is purportedly afraid that she has a grave illness. But is she really ill, or neurotically hypochondriac? And if really ill, how seriously and immediately? And can anything be done for her, ill or not? Don't wait for me, or for Henry James, to answer! Then there's the question of what to make of Kate Croy's unsavory father, the second personage introduced into the novel. Surely Kate's relationship to her father is the key to her character? Surely there's a secret in their past? But Kate denies Merton Densher's - and the reader's - right to enquire about it, and Henry james complies. Metaphorically, this book is like an unopened letter, tossed impulsively into the fire, which contained the very piece of knowledge that would make everything fall in place but which can now never be retrieved. In fact, such a letter WILL figure in the narrative. James is determinedly unhelpful, methodically vague, craftily obscure. Every adverbial thicket is part of his scheme to enmesh the reader in complexity. In short, he MEANS to make your reading painful. As my personal trainer says: No Pain, No Gain! That was, come to think of it, more or less what my college literature professor meant also, when he declared The Wings of the Dove to be a great novel.

Is it too arrogant of me to suppose that 'Wings' will perplex, annoy, and ultimately bore the average reader? Very well, I'll risk being arrogant. Even the above-average reader may find it hard-going. Some critics have asserted that it's James's best. James himself, in later years, regarded it as unsuccessful. It's tremendously ambitious, stylistically, structurally, psychologically. I admire ambition in a novelist.