Portrait of a Novel By Michael Gorra

The story of a man and his masterpiece that helped bring literature into a new age.

‘Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece’ by Michael Gorra. 416 pp. Liveright. US$30.

Henry James once described the “house of fiction” as one that has “not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned.” In his metaphor, the novelist stands within the house and looks out through any one of these many windows onto all manner of human experience transpiring in the external world. But in Portrait of a Novel, Smith College professor Michael Gorra reverses the metaphor; he stands with the reader on the lawn and the balconies and looks into the many windows of James’s life, peering in on both the psychological and biographical circumstances that helped shape his masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady. The book is part scholarly yet compelling close read of that text, part biography, and part travelogue—Gorra retraced many of James’s expatriated steps though Europe. The author’s encyclopedic understanding of not only James, but also his influences and contemporaries, offers a thoroughly illustrated and appropriately tumultuous picture of fiction’s awkward adolescence between stilted Victorianism and modernistic messiness. The reader does not have to love or even be particularly familiar with James’s work to enjoy this book; this is as much a story about the creative process itself, or the function of genius, as it is about any particular product.
The Daily Beast