Word: jamesians
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...retrospect, it is easy to see why Henry James at first viewed the younger Edith Wharton with some alarm. He might have invented her, except that she was a Jamesian heroine even richer and brighter than his imagination had dared. And her novels made more money than his. The record of their growing friendship is only one of many happy adventures in this brimming, brilliant collection...
Like fiddlers who want to conduct and comedians who yearn to play Hamlet, thriller writers sometimes show symptoms of hankering after respectability. John le Carre has handled this problem by surrounding his plots with a Jamesian density of details and implications. Now Len Deighton, known to millions of readers as the author of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, has, temporarily at least, given up suspense altogether...
...tell right off when a novelist knows his way around the block. Take the first sentence of Larry McMurtry's moody, sensitive, ironic yet lightheartedly despairing new novel: "Duane was in the hot tub, shooting at his new doghouse with a .44 Magnum." The Jamesian restraint of the language -- not "Blam, blam, blam, wood chips glinted in the dusty air," but a dreamlike, almost passive kind of doghouse blasting -- foreshadows subtle stuff. The hero, we sense, is a country boy (the name Duane, and the implication that there is enough vacant acreage behind the doghouse so that stray bullets...
Soon enough, though, she straightens up to introduce herself to the camera. It's not that she cares what people think of her, she says with a candid smile, but "enough is enough." Tired of being called a "freak" (in the Rick Jamesian sense), she'd like to set the record straight. Thus, the parade of Nola-experts--including father, ex-roommate, sexologist, and lovers--rolls out. She knows that their comments--for instance, "I was the best thing to happen to Nola Darling...I was the sculptor, and she was but a piece of clay"--will be her best...
...humbling realization that the London she so wanted to experience wasn't such a charming place after all. The reader can salvage a cruel irony The reader can salvage a cruel irony from this haphazard flow of events: for all her sexual exploits. Lauren remains a sort of Jamesian character, an innocent abroad, too naive and unsuspecting to see the web of intrigue in which she's been tangled...