No love, no sex, no action - odd anywhere but...in the novels of Henry James

Nearing the end of Henry James's "The Princess Casamassima," the novel courses through a series of lengthy one-on-one scenes involving long, intricate passages of dialogue that explore various nuances of feeling and belief: Hyacinth (working-class hero of the novel, in love with the Princess, pledged to become a terrorist assassin) and his best friend, Paul, in Greenwich, in which H. tentatively probes P. to see if he, too, love the P.C.; Paul visits the P.C. in the working-class neighborhood she's moved into, trading down, and strikingly, as she apologizes for her bleak surroundings, he says it's the kind of home he'd dreamed of; Vetch, H's benefactor and father-figure, visits the P.C. and urges her to release H. from his pledge to become a terrorist; and of course H and the P.C. It would be odd anywhere but James - but at this point, after at least months of nightly meetings and discussions, there is no expression of love, much less of sexual drive, between Hyacinth and the Princess - James is a great writer, but there are some areas through which he never treads. Hyacinth's pledge to the German radical to take on a mysterious assignment, when it comes to him, to assassinate someone and pay the price, becomes ever odder as we near the end of the novel: will we ever know what H. is called upon to do? It's another version of The Beast in the Jungle, but instead of the protagonist waiting a lifetime for the mysterious great action to occur - it's we who are waiting. In Jamesian fashion, there's a great deal of talk and analysis and subtle probings of the emotions, all circling around an action that never occurs, a black hole at the vortex of the novel.