Warning: Do not drive or operate heavy machinery when reading Henry James

Was very tired last night when reading Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady" and believe me, despite its strengths, this novel is not one to keep you awake at night. About a third of the way through (200 pages), and Mr. Touchett dies leaving Isabel a small fortune. Now, she can afford to be an independent woman, and we'll see where that gets her. Mrs. Touchett, the aunt who has more or less adopted Isabel and brought her from Albany to Europe, becomes even more of a self-centered bitch, immediately putting the London house up for sale, ignoring her very ill son, Ralph, and complaining about her late husband's largesse. She and Isabel take off for Paris. James's writing is strange here, in that he does very little with transitions - characters just go from here to there without passage between locales - and in fact, despite a few scenes of very fine and (for him) simple description, such as the evening in the small London park, he's not all that interested in exterior description - he describes characters (too much), and his novels are almost entirely interior affairs - which is why he thought he could be a great dramatist (most of his novels are built heavily on dialogue) and why he in fact was a horrible dramatist (theater-goers like to see something happen rather than listen to two hours of subtle, nuanced rumination). The focus on Portrait moving more, I think, toward the newly introduced Madame Merle, with whom Isabel is unduly fascinating and who I suspect will betray her in some devastating manner.