Why should we read Henry James?

Only 75 pages into Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady" and already we've had a shooting, a double-suicide, a blackmail threat, a hijacking, and two kinky sex scenes - oh, wait a minute, that must have been some other novel I was reading. No, we don't ready James for the breathtaking plot. He's not a page-turner, he's a page-starer. But there are rewards and there are reasons why we do, or should, read Henry James. First of all, he writes about character, and his characters reveal themselves through their conversation and we learn more about them from the conversation of others (and occasionally from the trenchant observations of the narrator). This technique is unusual and requires, of both author and reader, a lot of patience and diligence. We learn about character slowly and incrementally, and a character's self-knowledge may prove faulty and what other characters think and say may prove to be wrong. The characters actually do very little, but because they do so little their few actions and decisions have great consequence. In the best of his novels (and especially the novellas, in my opinion), this works very well, as characters are faced with moral decisions or with decisions that will change the course of their lives. The downside is that the lives of his characters are very insulated from others. Few of his characters have any responsibilities or sensibilities beyond their tiny social set (The Bostonians an exception). Portrait of Lady seems, so far, to be one of his best as it fully plays to his greatest strength. Why James failed as a dramatist, given his skilled use of dialogue in fiction, is another question that I'll look at in a later post.