John Horgan in Nautilus:
Science journalism is really about everything, I like telling my science-journalism students, because science is really about everything. Take The Golden Bowl, the insanely prolix novel by Henry James, which I read as penance after zipping through a Stephen King gore-fest. The Golden Bowl, I’d heard, is a slog compared to thrillers like The Portrait of a Lady and Turn of the Screw, but James called Bowl his “solidest” novel. By that he must have meant the most Jamesian because The Golden Bowl reads like a parody of James. H.G. Wells’ comparison of James to a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea comes to mind.
Almost nothing happens, and yet nothing is straightforward, certainly not the prose. James jams sentences with subjunctives and conditionals, second and third thoughts, double and triple negatives. Just once, I whined, I wish you’d say what you mean. Plus, the characters are socialites who would never dream of washing their own dishes. But the book grew on me. Superficially dated, it is actually bracingly modern, or timeless. It dwells on what psychologists call “theory of mind,” our supposedly innate ability to infer each other’s thoughts. James is telling us, in effect: You think you know what’s going on in other peoples’ heads? Think again.
More here.