The Future of the Novel: Essays on the Art of Fiction. Henry James.

The Future of the Novel: Essays on the Art of Fiction.
Henry James.
Edited by Leon Edel.
New York: Vintage Books. 1956.

A series of essays on the novel and its practitioners in James's time--Dickens, George Eliot, Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, de Maupassant, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Trollope, HG Wells, Arnold Bennett and Joseph Conrad. Verbose is an understatement. The language rattles on with an occasional glimpse of a few comprehensible ideas. That language overwhelms the reader with its profuse use of metaphor and analogy, often in very long sentences and paragraphs, in interruptions, digressions and asides that soon lose the point being made for this reader. Sentences and paragraphs are verbal mazes that do not seem to make their points clearly. A vast accumulation of language that signifies very little, in my opinion. RayS.

Some of James's ideas: The only purpose of the novel is to reflect life. The good novel should give the reader a sense of experience. Two types of novels are those that have a pattern and plan and lead to a unity of impression and those that are merely a series of episodes. Character is the essence of the novel. As long as there are people, there will be mirrors and novels.

Different novelists and different people see the same experience differently There are two kinds of novelists: those who comment on their characters' motives and those, like de Maupassant, who show the characters in action and allow the reader to infer the motives. Probably James's most fruitful essay was on Trollope who cared nothing for the theory of the novel or novel writing and whose production of novels became almost a mechanical process. His only concern was his story, but his novels reflected his time so well that many of them will continue to be read.

Having reviewed some of James's ideas on the novel, I have to admit they're useful. I'd almost say that they represent the essence of the novel. But his book is still verbose. RayS.