Whatever happened to Henry James?

Is there anyone, anywhere in the world, outside of an English graduate program or faculty, that has any desire to read the late works of Henry James? James is a writer who makes the most out of a little, the shrewdest and sharpest observer of the nuances of expression and behavior and the subtlest expressions of emotion. His early and middle works are extremely limited in scope - always about the same people, well-to-do Americans and high-born but not quite as well to do Europeans, generally with nothing to do in life but ponder their own self-importance, characters of amazing privilege who are unaware of their good fortune and who do little or nothing to help others in the world - they think they're worldly but the actually provincials. Of course James does not write about these people with irony or detachment: he's one of them, with the single exception that he writes, and that's a huge exception. Then what happens? In his late works, his style becomes so amazingly, distressingly self-conscious, the sentences meander for ever, full of more clauses and parenthetical qualifications, often putting "words" in "quotes" to "set them off" for no "apparent" reason. Ugh. Unreadable! As his brother William put it, Henry tends to chew more than he can bite off. I once read the change in style had to do with his writing by typewriter (thank god he didn't have a laptop). "The Jolly Corner" is the James selection in American Fantastic Tales; an odd choice, in that The Turn of the Screw is a more famous ghost story, and the best - but not set in America and maybe too long? The first half of The Jolly Corner could be summarized in one phrase - man spends time in vacant house in which he grew up listening for ghosts - but of course so could Proust, and that would miss everything. The question is: was there anything worth not missing? More in next post.