In my late teens, when I read Henry James for the first time, the experience did nothing for me. I felt faintly repelled by the blocks of unyielding text, the walls of what appeared to be sadistically abstruse sentences that, serpentine in form and labyrinthine in prepositional phrases, never seemed content to simply end. Here, I thought, echoing the sentiments of many a ruffled online reviewer, was a writer, who had accomplished, possibly more than any of his contemporaries, the dishonorable feat of managing to say absolutely nothing in as many and misjudged words as possible. Verbose. Pretentious. And most unforgivable of all: deadly dull.
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