Reviews for Life's Handicap

The average rating for Life's Handicap based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-06-05 00:00:00 Michael Wolters This is supposed to be horror y/n? Does something creepy eventually happen? I read 2/3 and it was so boring. A boring trust-fund-baby-turned older man maundering on and on to his poor spinster recently-acquired friend who puts up with him for some reason about his property. Which is described, and seems neither especially jolly nor haunted.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-26 00:00:00 Joseph Bunn Sometimes you take a bite out of literature, and sometimes literature takes a bite out of you. Reading The Jolly Corner exhausted me; Henry James's prose, while apt and detailed, felt drawn-out and extended in ways that served only to fulfill the "intellectual for the sake of sounding intellectual" type of writing I come across often while reading classics. I found the story itself intriguing - a man who traveled abroad in Europe comes back to New York after 30 years, and the ghost of his possible self haunts him in his old apartment complex - but the long paragraphs and superfluous language distracted me from the key elements of the story, such as the narrator's complex relationship with himself and his neighbor and how his apartment's physical location alters his self-perception. Recommended for those interested in Henry James, in particular those who would sacrifice some of their precious time to wade through his difficult prose in this piece.