The Wings of the Dove Book

Soooo you guys, I think missed that day in English Lit 101 when we talked about Henry James, because to me he's always been one of those authors you merely know OF, and who is important in some vague way but you couldn't possibly say how, who is not really relevant in our 3G world except for the fact that Merchant Ivory makes mad bank off of this lace-petticoat-and-social-graces kind of thing. But for serious you guys, why did no one never tell me that Henry James is a GENIUS?! I mean, why is this not more widely discussed? Like how after reading him you can never look at a conversation in the same way because he is absolutely devastating in creating and describing and codifying how a mood can shift from sentence to sentence, how he who actually walks you from glance to glance? Like how the plot of this book, so languid to start, coils you into a tighter and tighter spring up until the very last sentence? Like how he doesn't so much describe things themselves as describe the light that falls on them, how it's not just what his characters say but what they don't, and how he's totally bitchin' at telling you about the silences? I mean, really:

"Her welcome, her frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the observer's part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for effect and harmony, as much as it gave - her whole attitude had, to his imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering, dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music."

This is just one of many, many passages that I wanted to rip out and rub all over my body. It is also one of many, many passages that took me about three readings to understand. This is one of the most difficult books I've ever read - I am depleted; I feel like I've been lobotomized circa 1906. I can't even begin to quantify the absolutely brick-like character of this text - though homeboy loves commas and sub-sub-clauses like nobody's business - but I have also never read a "difficult" book or a "classic" that is so sentence-for-sentence rewarding as this one. I want to write a check to the estate of this man. I can't even ridicule the really pretentious critical edition with douchbaggery essays titled like "Henry James: Art and Thought" because dear god, I give - I GET it. Henry James is a genius.