Word: jamesians
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...evocative--they hypnotize the unsuspecting reader. Several of her earlier novels are set in hospitals or clinics, close bound communities associated with death or abnormality. Innocent House provides a less obviously macabre setting. This gilded faux Venetian palace on the banks of the Thames is as unexpected as a Jamesian corpse and as grotesquely gaudy...
...fuss? This is a Jamesian question, one James herself, dressed in a red print dress and square-heeled shoes, seventy-odd years old, sensible British citizen, might see fit to ask. Even she, however, in the thirty years since her first mystery was published, has come to expect the commotion, and she knows how to please her fans. Clever, articulate and often drily hilarious, she obviously delighted in her audience. A week later, in a phone interview form Dallas with a Crimson reporter, she sounded tired (unsurprisingly, caught up in a whirl-wind tour), but responded thoughtfully to what must...
...time Louis Auchincloss came along to write such Jamesian, Whartonian novels of manners as The Rector of Justin and The Great World and Timothy Colt, the Society of Mrs. Astor's ballroom no longer meant much, except to itself. The European aristocracy that it had tried to emulate was moribund and more impoverished than ever, and in the U.S. there were simply too many circles of the rich and self-pleased -- in the oil and entertainment industries, in politics, in the media business, among wealthy alumni of Midwestern cow colleges, lately in the computer industry -- for any one social elite...
There is, of course, some value to this. New ages need new forms, and addressing today's young in sentences of Jamesian complexity would be about as helpful as talking to them in Middle English. Rhetoric, in any case, is no less manipulative than technology, and no less formulaic. Though TV is a drug, it can be stimulant as well as sedative. And the culture that seems to be taking over the future is a culture so advanced in imagemaking that it advertises its new sports cars with two-page photographs of rocks (though the Japanese, perhaps, enjoy an advantage...
...characters. Some are confronted with familiar situations. The young woman in the title story learns the truth about her parents' marriage after her mother dies and her father's new wife tactfully but deliberately eliminates traces of her predecessor. The plot of The Skaters is complicated and, yes, Jamesian: a disinherited son is helped by his lawyer's wife, whose lover steals the original copy of the damaging will. Spencer is dispassionate about domestic morality but intensely curious about the things people do, the lies they live and the truths they hide. Her stories are graceful, solidly crafted and honest...