The Spoils of Poynton

Whoever thought Henry James could write a really funny book? It may not be Catch-22, or Enderby, or Lolita, but it reeks and drips with irony and has genuine laugh-out-loud scenes, especially starring Mrs. Gereth, who is blunt about pandering Fleda to her feckless son. Spare and incisive, with only a disagreeable surfacing now and then of James' 'late' style (ponderous and unnecessarily intricate, making you read over sentences five times to extract their meaning), This is the first book he wrote after the excruciating failure of the play Guy Domville (see Leon Edel's bio, if you can stand cringing at the way James was treated) and he apparently said to himself: "I will show these cretins how a real writer writes." You cannot go wrong if you like James.

James inside the mind.

James writing broad satire? Who would have thought!