BOOK REVIEWS 159 Derek W. Valliant is Professor of Communication Studies at the Uni- versity of Michigan and author of Sounds of Reform: Progres- sivism and Music in Chicago, 1873–1935 (2005). Henry James Goes to Paris. By Peter Brooks. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 256.$24.95.) In Henry James Goes to Paris, Peter Brooks, Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale, offers a biographical and critical examination of a transitional moment in James’s career: the period from 1875 to 1876, when, at the age of thirty-two, the author lived in Paris and immersed himself in Parisian culture, meeting fellow writers and frequenting art exhibitions, which he reviewed for the New York Tribune. Although James had already released Watch and Ward, A Passionate Pilgrim, and Roderick Hudson, Brooks reminds us that he was still “Henry James Jr.,” not yet the Master he would become. James was striving to define himself as a writer and literary critic, striving to find his own voice among naturalists and realists on both sides of the Atlantic. As urbane as he seems to us now, in 1875, James considered himself an outsider to the literary circles he hoped would come to embrace him. As Brooks portrays him, James was, in many ways, a very young man, resistant to the new and threatened by some he judged masters of their art. He was an adoring acolyte to Ivan Turgenev, who brought him to Gustave Flaubert, at whose literary “at-homes” James met a host of writers, including the young Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Edmond de Goncourt, and Alphonse Daudet. As he confessed to his friend Thomas Perry, James had found the gods on Mount Olym- pus. Not all the gods, though, seemed to him worthy of worship. As much as James revered Turgenev, he did not immediately appreciate Flaubert, whose fiction was characterized, James thought, by intellect rather than passion and who inspired in James both affection and squeamishness. Flaubert, James decided, was at heart a corrupted man. James had hoped to meet George Sand, who had died in the summer of 1876 and for whom he felt a qualified admiration; her works, he wrote, “answered to the childish formula of ‘making up as you go along’” (p. 34). Brooks pronounces such early responses “prissy and priggish” (p. 36). James’s experience in Paris, Brooks as- serts, “seems to be all about missing things on the spot—but,” he adds, “somehow” James “stor[ed] them away for later retrieval and Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.1.159 by guest on 30 September 2021 160 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY reinterpretation” (p. 28). In fact, Brooks argues, nothing was lost on James. James never ceased to experiment in his fiction, and Brooks sees that many works written at the turn of the century—What Maisie Knew, “In the Cage,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” “The Jolly Corner,” The Sacred Fount—reflect what James learned from Flaubert, among others. James became concerned with seeing and knowing, with the tenuousness of knowledge, and with observers’ possible disorienta- tion. In short, the questions with which modernist writers struggled became his own. Brooks argues that What Maisie Knew, set in France, most effectively illustrates what James was attempting to explore in his fiction: how does consciousness develop? how is an ethical conscious- ness generated? how do we construct meanings from a necessarily limited perspective? The seeds of these questions, Brooks thinks, lie in James’s French connections. Lessons he had learned from Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola in 1875, but had then repressed, reemerged later, Brooks contends, in James’s preoccupation with centers of con- sciousness. Maupassant, seven years younger than James, became a frequent companion, and yet James’s early assessment of him was not positive. Maupassant did not create complex characters; he was too focused on the “erotic element” (p. 166). Yet it is clear from James’s notebooks that he respected Maupassant’s talents for concise- ness, for the vivid stroke, for the telling detail. By the 1890s, when James decided to devote himself to writing tales rather than novels— they were easier to place, he said—a Maupassant story was his ideal. James always thought of Balzac as an exemplary novelist. He only appreciated Flaubert, however—expressing a generosity in Notes on Novelists that the earlier, and harsher, French Poets and Novelists lacked—until twenty years after the Frenchman’s death. Brooks ad- mits that he thinks “it is remarkable that James, now the successful and celebrated novelist, feels the need to return to those we might see as the Masters of 1875, to reassess them, to get them right this time” (p. 162). Henry James Goes to Paris takes its place with Edwin Fussell’s The French Side of Henry James (1990) and Pierre Walker’s Reading Henry James in French Cultural Contexts (1995), two well-regarded critical works. As scholars continue to explore James’s connection to modernism, his investment in examining consciousness, and his literary experimentation, this book offers subtle readings of James’s works and his cultural affinities. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.1.159 by guest on 30 September 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 161 Linda Simon, Professor of English at Skidmore College, is the author of, most recently, The Critical Reception of Henry James: Creating a Master. Building Victorian Boston: The Architecture of Gridley J. F. Bryant. By Roger Reed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 224.$39.95.) So brilliant was the architectural career of Boston’s native son Charles Bulfinch that he has dominated the city’s popular mem- ory, thus obscuring the work of numerous worthy successors. Roger Reed’s biography of Gridley J. F. Bryant, whose career spanned much of the nineteenth century, draws the once-renowned archi- tect and his buildings out from under Bulfinch’s long shadow. In- deed, as Reed shows, Bryant’s architecture did much to move Boston beyond Bulfinch, allowing the city to fashion a new iden- tity for itself as a modern metropolis, a transformation symbolized by the construction, during the 1860s, of Bryant and Arthur Gilman’s French Second Empire–style City Hall on the spot where Bulfinch’s county courthouse once stood. In this sense, Reed’s book is also the story of a city and a century as ambitious and energetic as Bryant himself. In treating Bryant’s life, Reed describes the evolution of the profes- sion to which he was committed as well. Born in 1816 to a prominent Boston mason, Bryant had “granite bred in the bone” (p. 5). In the 1830s, young Bryant—most likely with the help of his father—secured an architectural apprenticeship under Alexander Parris, best known for designing Faneuil Hall (Quincy) Market. At that time, before the advent of professional organizations and specialized schooling, archi- tects often emerged from the ranks of builders, where they received practical, on-the-job instruction. It was this sort of traditional training that made Bryant seem, as a friend once described him, “[a]n Archi- tect of the Old School” to later generations (p. 1). Once established in the business, he showed little interest in helping organize the ar- chitectural societies and institutes that flourished in post–Civil War Boston, preferring instead to mentor aspiring architects at his office at 4 Court Street. And while his colleagues were busy studying European architecture abroad and relocating their practices to other burgeoning cities, Bryant was content to remain in Boston, even during difficult economic periods. Yet Gridley Bryant was no rigid provincial, and as Reed’s portrait of him makes clear, much of his success lay in his Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.1.159 by guest on 30 September 2021.