Michael Gorra, _Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece_

THE WORD "MASTERPIECE" in the subtitle turns out to mean not (as it usually does these days when used colloquially) "the best thing X ever did" (for Gorra, that would be James's final novels, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors), but something closer to what the term originally meant: the work that elevated you past the status of journeyman, that proved you were ready to take on apprentices of your own, that showed you could do whatever someone in your calling was supposed to be able to do.

Thus, The Portrait of a Lady is the novel that announces James's arrival as a master, the first work that reveals the full extent of his armory as an artist. Hard to argue with, fan of Roderick Hudson though I am. I admired Portrait when I first read it back in graduate school, and the few chances I have had to teach it have only deepened my admiration. Gorra's book deepened it further.

Portrait of a Novel alternates between two tracks: first, a close (and largely theory-free) reading of the novel, from beginning to end; second, a biography of James. This works out better than I had expected. An account of James's perpetually-in-transit childhood turns out to run well alongside an analysis of Isabel Archer's arrival in England, for instance, and a chapter on James's unsuccessful attempt to reinvent himself as a playwright seems a fitting partner for the chapters in which Isabel's illusions are exploded as she learns the truth of Osmond's relationship to Madame Merle.

Portrait of a Novel was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, which raised a couple of questions for me. First, is this really biography? I mean, yes, half of it is. But, as the title suggests, it is largely a book about a novel, so why wasn't it nominated for the Pulitzer in criticism? But it turns out the Pulitzer Prize for criticism typically goes to someone who writes newspaper or magazine reviews, not to someone mainly known for his or her books, and virtually never to an academic (Gorra teaches at Smith).

So, why isn't there a Pulitzer or National Book Award for literary criticism? Because hardly anyone outside the academy gives a hoot about anything except reviews, maybe. Is there such a thing these days as literary criticism aimed at an intelligent general readership? A Stephen Jay Gould, a Brian Greene, an Elaine Pagels, a Jill Lepore of literary criticism? It's hard to think of anyone who fits that bill, well and truly, since Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling passed back in the 1970s. I can think of people who wrote books of lit-crit for the intelligent but non-specialist reader that somehow caught on--Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Stephen Greenblatt. We don't have anyone as popular as Stephen Ambrose, though; I don't think we even have anyone as popular as Jill Lepore. Why not?