Penultimate James!!! After this I need to find a copy of his ghost stories and I've read all da James from all of my lists! OMG! What a reliefHallelujah I am finished with the misogynist that is Henry James.

I really hate giving any book a low rating but this one was really bad. I've tried other Henry James books and only found one I really liked. Not sure if it's the author or me.

Thank god we don’t choose who we marry based on familial expectations anymore. (Says the gay man on his second marriage because he was expected to marry a woman the first time.)

Another James in which a young woman learns about adults’ callous selfishness. A study of adolescence in a libertine/liberated society.

So...this is not my favorite Henry James book, and I generally love Henry James.It's not awful, but it's particularly difficult to follow (even for James, who is famously esoteric with his character's thoughts) and just...not terribly interesting.

This novel marks yet one more qualitative shift upward in James's art. There is so much going on in this novel that it is really impossible to usefully describe in a review format like this (and ironically this novel began as an idea for a short story!). Suffice it to say, this is a deceptively difficult novel to fully comprehend. The prose is almost entirely a series of dialogues between the characters, and the lure for the reader of today is to allow yourself to be drawn into the interchange o...

I am always amazed how Henry James has an effect on me after I have read one of his stories & this one sure left me feeling quite sad & in awe of his ability to create a story with characters so unique to the times he writes. In almost all his books that I have read thus far, I start out uncertain where the story is going & really more confused in this one, where whole attention is needed but feeling rewarded at the end but many lose ends & unexplained happenings are still apparent, yet I loved

The Awkward Age is a truly interesting work of James', from a time when he was very involved with plays. It is a work of prose carefully crafted to read much like a play-script; it has very little narratorial voice and concerns itself mostly with dialogue. This was fascinating for me because, with nearly no narration, reading the novel was like being in the same room with these people, hearing what they say and seeing what they do, but nothing else. Thus, one must draw upon his own experiences i...

I think Henry James must have had some issues with parents as he was growing up. Now I'm not saying that his parents were bad parents or bad people, but he sure has created some truly monstrous parental units in a good bit of his fiction, and the parents and adult guardians in The Awkward Age are certainly no exception and are right up there with 'Dr, Sloper' ("Washington Square"), 'Gilbert Osmond' ("The Portrait of a Lady"), or little Maisie's parents ("What Maisie Knew").This is a novel that r...

Damn you, Henry James. I remain a faithful apologist but your social nuance has stopped aging well. The wine's turning to vinegar or something. To be fair, it seems this one's just for the hardest of the hardcore, which makes sense because I didn't understand half of the subtle intrigue going on, or when people in conversations were being wildly controversial or spoiling secrets or just speaking off the cuff. In true Jamesian fashion, the heroine is neither beautiful nor plain but aesthetically

In the previous Henry James book I read, the main character, Christopher Newman, visited the Louvre, and being a bit overwhelmed by the profusion of pictures, he simply sat on a bench in front of one of them for the whole afternoon.Just as he'd been happy to ignore the rest of the paintings in the huge gallery, Newman was happy that day to ignore the major part of Veronese's 'The Marriage at Cana’, and simply focus on a little scene in the corner of the painting which satisfied his conception of...

She remained alone for ten minutes, at the end of which her reflections – they would have been seen to be deep – were interrupted by the entrance of her husband. The interruption was indeed not so great as if the couple had not met, as they almost invariably met, in silence: she took, at all events to begin with, no more account of his presence than to hand him a cup of tea accompanied with nothing but cream and sugar. Her having no word for him, however, committed her no more to implying that h...

Scene OneMy old mate Henry James will rescue me from this blizzard of unlovable novels I have been trudging through – now, where did I get up to? What were the last ones I read by The Master? Ah yes –The Spoils of Poynton (1897) – classic stuffWhat Maisie Knew (1898) – brilliantThe Turn of the Screw (1898) – unsurpassedSo the next one is The Awkward Age (1899) – oh boy, looking forward to this.Scene Two (a week later)Can’t…. do it…. any…more…unh….. what's happening.....(Crash.)Scene Three (a hos...

Henry James loosens the corset of convention in a comedyof ambiguous desires and ambitions. Plenty of matrimonialtalk goes round in discreet, repetitive circles; the tenor isalways tender. A vivid worldling of 'a certain age' (41) ponders her daughter's future while manipulating a boring husby, protectingher rotter of a son and managing a beau that the heroine-daughter fancies. Salonistas insist on keeping up appearances. A tea party falls apart when it's revealed that someone there is reading s...

I read this years ago, but rereading it now, I see that I made nothing of it at the time. THIS time, going very carefully, making sure not to get lost in the intricate layers of the dialogue, I found an extraordinary, extraordinarily sad story, whose young heroine's coming of age consists not in moving into adulthood but in assuming moral and emotional responsibility for her own parents -- who never parented her and whose parent she herself becomes -- and the man she continues to love even when

Every so often I feel this urge to read something classic to offset the tawdry "dime-store" novels I'm typically devouring. This time it's a novel by Henry James. This was his last novel before James's "final period" of three very difficult and demanding novels. This book of manners at the end of the the 19th century in London isn't something I'd recommend to anyone who isn't already familiar with Henry James. It's an exercise in style over plot. In this case, exploring a corrupt social circle o...

Ok ok 4 stars because I’m too chicken to give Henry 3 (or, whisper it, 2). My rationale is any book which makes me think must be worth something.I’m still puzzling it out. I’ll have to read the last few chapters again. Very near the end, there is a chapter where all the characters repeatedly comment on the momentous events of the previous chapter, and in retrospect this particular chapter would appear to have been somewhat climactic in the novel as a whole. I had read it entirely innocent of any...

Ordinarily, I enjoy a good Henry James book. But this book left me so cold. Ostensibly, it is about a coming-of-age girl and the immoral influences she is surrounded by. The characters are a bit flat, but what irritated me most about the book was certain little catch-phrases the author used to death. Instead of saying, "he said," when a character expressed himself warmly, he always says "he ejaculated." After the third time on one page, it got very annoying. Another term he used, to describe th

Unyielding: A Review of The Awkward Age (1899) by Henry James James mentions at one point in this novel that he assumes a reader unusually attentive to the “mutual relations” of his characters. The scarcity of such readers may explain the frequent estimation of the book as little more than “talk” carried on by a set of lightweight English aristocrats and saturated with sexual innuendo. I agree that following this story demands patience and that its length and frequent opaqueness can be irritati...

How can a Henry James novel be dull? Too much conversation, idiotic characters, and a lack of languid description, that's how.