Word: jamesian
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...Oxford grad with an exacting, reverential, and eventually obsessive eye for beauty, whether found in the heights of a Gothic cathedral, the curves of his first lover, Leo, or the electric rush of cocaine. He finds it quite often in the work of his hero, Henry James. The consciously Jamesian touches of both Nick and the novel itself—the hero at once inside and outside a society, the incisive but never-misanthropic critic, the genuine appreciation of beauty, money, and power—all lend Hollinghurst’s plot and characters a sense of historical and cultural...
This is, in fact, an intensely literal, historical, reverent treatment of a year in the life of Jesus, son of God. It's written in simple, sedate language that steers clear of both clanging anachronisms and those King Jamesian ye's and unto's and begats. A few liberties are taken; Rice plays with the idea that young Jesus might have befriended the philosopher Philo of Alexandria, and she has Jesus perform the odd healing or two and a bit of weather control, but that's hardly much of a walk on the apocryphal side...
...takes the time--all right, sometimes too much time--to meander up paths that are not strictly germane to its main narrative. But mostly that pays off--in funny tossed-off lines and quirky situations and a nice warm glow at the end. We're not dealing with Jamesian complexity here. But we do have something almost as rare to contemplate: a big Hollywood machine that's unexpectedly full of wit and--dare we say it?--intelligence. --By Richard Schickel
...from promising to prizewinning in a single bound, Roth could have set about repeating the formula that had brought him such instant recognition. But one of his more intriguing aspects has been his refusal to tailor his work to anyone else's expectations. Within a decade of the delicate Jamesian fiction in Goodbye, Columbus, Roth wrote Portnoy's Complaint, a barbaric yawp of masturbatory misadventures and comic rage...
...voice--spare, understated, unsentimental--and his typical subject matter--moments of truth in the lives of hard-luck men and women who know they are failing in a country consecrated to success--became immediately recognizable. Carver resisted the trend toward gentrification in U.S. fiction, the Jamesian notion that only those with fine-tuned sensibilities and no money worries have the leisure to mess up their lives in interesting ways. Carver could write about life's losers without any condescension because he had often felt he was one of them...