Reviewer: Alan Chin
Publisher: Scribner
Pages: 338
Colm Toibin captures the mind and heart of Henry James, a
novelist and playwright born into one of America’s first intellectual families
two decades before the Civil War. James
left his country to live with the privileged artists and writers in Paris,
Rome, Venice and London. He lived the simple, lonely life that most dedicated
writers live, often locked in a room with typewriter and his imagination. And
when in public, he studied people and situations for inspiration for his
stories.
Toibin captures the loneliness and longing, the joys and
despair of a man wedded to his art, but never to a lover. Toibin suggests that
James was gay, but paints a picture of a man who never resolved his sexual
identity, and whose attempts at intimacy inevitably failed. Time and again,
James, who is considered the master of psychological subtlety, is incapable of
understanding his own heart and passionate longings.
Toibin doesn’t tell a story of James’ life so much as he
paints a detailed portrait of the writer’s perspective on life, love, death, and
art. Toibin paints this portrait with supple, exquisitely modulated brush
strokes that I found emotionally tense and moving.
I was reminded somewhat of how Michael Cunningham captured
the mind and soul of Virginia Woolf in his novel The Hours. In the same way, through the eyes and heart of the
artist, the reader sees the mystery of art itself. I found it utterly
brilliant.
With superlative prose and a deep understanding of the
writer’s life, Colm Toibin demonstrates that he, too, is a master.
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