On Henry James

 This is too good -- from the LRB: 

"Imagine a typical Jamesian plot (or imbroglio as he preferred to call it, ‘plot’ being a ‘nefarious name’): an innocent American comes to Europe and is befriended by a Europeanised American and an older European woman (almost certainly a contessa or a princess, but titles are optional). The innocent American falls half or three-quarters in love with the contessa, and/or a shade homoerotically with the Europeanised American, or with the relationship between the two. Much conversation follows, and much ‘flirtation’ as we might be tempted to call it, in which the American is ‘seduced’ (culturally) by his hosts and maybe wants to be ‘seduced’ (physically) by the ambient culture. (Are you noticing all these adverbs and inverted commas, by the way?) Then the American sees the contessa with the Europeanised American arm in arm in the park or, perhaps, in the Soane Museum, when they have said they will be elsewhere. And at this point the climax of the Jamesian imbroglio occurs, a point of recognition at which a more vulgar author might have the Innocent American exclaim: ‘OMG. They’re fucking?’ At that moment the ‘centre’ does not hold, realising as it does that what it had admiringly thought to be the case is, ‘really’, not the case at all. James talks of the ‘original grossness of readers’. But there is an ‘original grossness’ at the heart of most of his exquisite fables: there is a thing going on, and probably a dirty thing, that the people in the fiction won’t or can’t see because their window is smeary or they are looking in the wrong direction."