The Master: A Novel

It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what Toibin has ventured here, with a remarkable degree of success. The book is a fictionalized study, based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclipsed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde. Thereafter the book ranges seamlessly back and forth over James's life, from his memories of his prominent Brahmin family in the States -- including the suicide of his father and the tragic early death of his troubled sister Alice -- to his settling in England, in a cherished house of his own choosing in Rye. Along the way it offers hints, no more, of James's troubled sexual identity, including his fascination with a young English manservant, his (apparently platonic) night in bed with Oliver Wendall Holmes and his curious obsession with a dashing Scandinavian sculptor of little talent but huge charisma. Another recurrent motif is James's absorbtion in the lives of spirited, highly intelligent but unhappy young women who die prematurely, which helped to inform some of his strongest fiction.