Shame James put himself, in the guise of humor and gentle mockery, into a social-political position that shows up his stuffiness. Personal and not social critique is his domain, as it turns out. Just because you can turn (and twist and turn and twist) a sentence doesn't mean you can't embarrass yourself with lack of forward thinking. Remember when Daisy Miller caught a moral fatal illness? Shoulda seen it coming. Stick with Wings of the Dove

Tides and eddies of emotion and the complex relationships between (sister) wives are the focus of this novel. The women would all be too easily stereotyped and flattened as victims in other less capable, clever, and empathetic hands. We needed a novel like this, and with this level of skill. I'm grateful

Here we have some Norwegian crime with one of the more straightforwardly loathsome protag-detectives I've come across. I'm thinking and not recalling one redeemable action he performs throughout the entire book. Actually he pretty much makes the worst choice each time. Read and wince. But, nuance is not introduced by his own lack of monster-awareness/self-reflection nor by the book featuring adversaries that somehow manage to be worse than he is.

Too many of his short stories involve a male narrator at "Vermillion Sands" observing yet another beautiful but ultimately crazy and/or homicidal woman. I get it, it's pulp, but Ballard is capable of better--and that's in here, too ("Storm Bird, Storm Dreamer", "End Game", "The Lost Leonardo", "The Illuminated Man" for starters). Given Ballard's inventiveness though, was not expecting such a thoroughly beaten dead horse.