Henry James’s last completed novels—The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl—are among the greatest achievements of modern fiction. The stories are perverse; characters are compelling even in their most cruel acts; acts themselves are often calculating and loving at the same time; every couple is troubled by the clash—or mesh—of love and self-interest; the fate of the heroes and heroines is ultimately decided by something that lies just beyond the reach of their own will and decision; the stories draw on deep-seated myths and fables but end with unsettling lack of finality. What more could readers want from a novel?

And yet these novels have troubled many of James’s most devoted readers, including those who elevated his reputation in the decades after his death. F.R. Leavis places James at the heart of the Great Tradition but despairs that the artistry of The Ambassadors outweighs the purport of its story. While admiring James’s passionate efforts “to realize life as emotion and to create it as art,” R.P. Blackmur concludes that the novels’ settings and themes fail “to bring out in James a mastery of substance equal to his mastery of form.” F.O. Matthiessen finds the lack of substantive social context in the fact that the sources of the immense wealth central to each of the stories—Mrs Newsome’s in The Ambassadors, Milly’s in The Wings of the Dove, the Ververs’ in The Golden Bowl—are utterly unknown. Famously composed by dictation to James’s typist after years of writing by hand had permanently damaged his prolific wrist, these works’ prose has been prized for its artfulness or seemed an obstacle to feeling and understanding. James’s brother, the philosopher William James, fumed at the late novels’ style: “You can’t skip a word if you are to get the effect, and 19 of 20 readers grow intolerant. The method is perverse. ‘Say it out, for God’s sake,’ they cry, ‘and have done with it.’” What do such reactions miss?

While James’s moneyed heroines certainly do not provide a vista onto the structure of society, they do occasion his exploration of the nature of freedom. The Portrait of a Lady, the 1881 novel that sets out so many of the psychological and aesthetic problems taken up two decades later in the late novels, poses a question that fascinates James: What are the conditions for a woman’s freedom? Ideally, it seems, she must be an orphan and unbelievably rich. In short, James doubted that women had very much freedom at all. Just as Isabel Archer is an orphan who is unexpectedly bequeathed a fortune, Milly in The Wings of the Dove is an heiress and orphan, and Maggie in The Golden Bowl an immensely wealthy half-orphan and only child. A latent social commentary could be teased out of novels based on the premise that a woman essentially lacks freedom unless in possession of untold wealth and devoid of family obligation. An inheritance of one’s own. But James’s purposes and focus lie elsewhere. He complicates the story by giving each of the heiresses a counterpart and initially veiled rival­. Charlotte, lacking family and fortune, attains high society by marrying Maggie’s father, having hidden her past romance with Maggie’s husband; Kate, a half-orphan rescued from poverty and family burdens by her rich aunt on the condition that she marry up, is secretly pledged to the poorly paid young journalist with whom Milly herself is infatuated.…

As Mark McGurl remarks at the outset of his extensive study of James’s import and impact for American fiction, “While one can trace strong lines of influence from James into the twentieth century, when a reading of the Master became de rigueur for ‘serious’ novelists…setting out on their caeers, the Jamesian tradition in the American novel is Jamesian less in its faithful adherence to any given narrative mode than in its effort to produce works that could be, as he put it, ‘reputed artistic indeed.’” Likewise the late novels had a significant impact on mid-century literary criticism, inspiring its recognition, and elevation, of the aesthetic dimension and value of novels. But those admiring critics’ concern that form outweighed substance is still echoed by astute readers, as when Leo Bersani declares “the at times staggering thinness of meaning in James’s late novels.”

Did the late James simply fail at the task Wordsworth assigned to the creator of unprecedented style and form: “to create the taste by which he is to be relished”? For my part, when I first reached out to inhabit the sensibility with which to delight in the late novels, the writing itself was as often an obstacle as a path to the sought-after attunement. I appreciate his brother’s reaction, though I’ve not been inclined to declare, say it out and have done with it. Nor is it a problem of the mere passage of time or the unfamiliar lifeworld of European aristocracy and American millionaires that he imaginatively wrought—or perhaps simply imagined! It is a result of literary history. My own aesthetic sensibility is hardly unique in being shaped by those developments of style and form that do not bear James’s influence, from the minimalisms of Kafka, Hemingway, Beckett, Cortàzar, Carver, and Kundera to the flamboyant amplifications of Grass, Fuentes, Morrison, Rushdie, and Pamuk. The latter are no help at all in getting hold of late James, for their verbal lushness and many-layered narratives are geared to the buried histories of whole peoples and to global cultural clashes and cross-fertilizations. It’s necessary to turn to the minimalists. I have to first make James a minimalist in order to understand the late novels and feel the undertow and riptides that roil beneath the prose’s monotonous undulations. I have to x-ray the plots; reduce the dialogues to the mere words actually exchanged; distill the domestic crises to their harrowing core; extricate the vectors of desire, demand, and will that link the characters. Only then does the power of James’s achievement slowly, implacably come through for me, only then does his indirect and elaborate storytelling come alive. I have to read James not with the sensibility he tried to create but with the sensibility that later novelists created without him. My experiment in reading James turns then to aggressive anachronism. I have to minimalize James in order to grasp his amplifications A quixotic aspiration perhaps, it’s my critical romance with the late novels.

Let’s start with the basics: the plots and endings.∞