Taking up Bill's challenge and reading Portait of a Lady

With old pal Bill Saunders yesterday, and Bill has always, to my puzzlement, held up Henry James's "Portrait of a Lady" as the paragon of literary excellence. Think I read it many years back when with grad-schoolish diligence I plowed through the (almost) complete works of James - of course James is always monumentally impressive, that is, impressive the way a monument can be: cold, austere, grand, uninviting. I have loved some of the novellas and stories - I think that's his best genre, the compression of the form helps him come to the point - but did also like some of the middle works (middle in regard to time of his career) but found the last works completely unreadable. Portrait is one of the middle works, so I decided to go back to it - remember trying this once before and being completely put off, or off put, by an opening scene at a British garden party. Well, the kind of novels he writes could obviously not be written, much less published, today. You need a gunshot in the first chapter, or at least a gun. But having put off, or off put, reading Portrait for many years, picked it up last night to try or retry again. And you know what I was very impressed - the middle works of James really are quite an accomplishment. In the first few chapters he very deftly sets up a tension - smart, sassy, naive American woman comes to England chaperoned or "rescued" from Albany by her aunt Mrs. Touchette, and settles in at the Touchette estate where the grumpy uncle, nearly completely estranged from his wife, warns the dapper and cynical young man not to fall for his niece. We can see what's going on here right away, but how will it play out? Obviously not a book for everyone, as the pacing is still glacial by modern standards, but so far a really smart and compelling novel beginning to unfold. Maybe Bill is right?