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Adult Books - Fiction - Crime Fiction - Mystery
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Author, Author.
Lodge, David (author).
Oct. 2004. 390p. Viking, hardcover, $24.95 (0-670-03349-9).
REVIEW.
First published September 15, 2004 (Booklist).
Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Edgar Allan Poe have fared quite well as the stars of novels dramatizing their lives, and now it’s Henry James’ turn. The great writer is the focus of Colm Toibin’s aptly named novel The Master [BKL Ap 1 04], and here Lodge fictionalizes James’ doomed attempt to shore up his finances by writing plays. The author of such intellectual romps as Therapy (1995) and Thinks (2001), Lodge is primarily a satirist, but he is also a literary critic, a discipline palpable in this expert if slightly awkward tribute. Lodge can’t help but launch into extended biographical and critical disquisitions but then, as though to leaven his erudition, renders his hero a bit too charmingly eccentric. And yet Lodge’s take on James’ theatrical adventures is suspenseful and empathetic, and his re-creation of James’ colorful milieu, including his quirky family, is vivid. Ultimately, Lodge portrays a genius who is aware of both his gifts and shortcomings and who revels in friendships. And, indeed, it is Lodge’s vital interpretations of James’ close ties to the Punch artist turned best-selling writer George du Maurier, and more problematic relationship with the popular American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, that infuse this smart novel with its satisfyingly piquant insights into a seminal, and persistently enigmatic, literary genius. — Donna Seaman
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