mere talk of love

Book review:

Washington Square

by Henry James (1843-1916)

New York: Doric Books, 1950

214 pages

Washington Square was written in 1880, depicting high society life in New York City in the 1840s and 1850s

Washington Square is a shallow dive into the meaning and the eternities of love.

Henry James offers 214 pages of sometimes desultory talk about love, and a couple kisses, and a touch—not an embrace—or two, and Catherine and Morris talk at each other about their concepts of love, but there are no awakenings, and no whispers melting on lips, and no warm zephyrs that fill the emptied spaces.

After Catherine and Morris have grudged their final words, Morris stomps away with his hat jammed on, Catherine returns to her knitting, and the reader is abandoned, adrift, still waiting to be filled by demonstrations of dearest love.

Henry James is a wordsmith, no dispute about that. The reader learns endearing and vastly frightening elements of the characters of the alleged lovers, and her curiously and completely unlikeable father, and Mrs. Penniman, the aunt who won’t butt out.

Henry James chases a plot, but doesn’t get his net around one.

The story line, for my taste, never ceases to be a prelude. There is no rip and no snorting in the pretend climax, and no satisfaction in the ersatz denouement.

If you want to argue that this presumed love story never gets started, and doesn’t really end, you get no argument from me.

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The Visible Hand:

The Managerial Revolution in American Business (book review)

no managers in olden times…

click here

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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”