Braving late James: The Ambassadors

Started Henry James's "The Ambassadors" (amazingly, this was the name of my junior-high school rock group - saw uncool a name as to be retroactively avant garde), which I haven't read since, I think, college - and came to it with some trepidation - through the first 5 or so pages I thought - can I really possibly read this? These nuanced, tortuous, ever-qualified sentences about minutia? But gradually my mind accustomed itself to James's style and what at first seemed daunting and impenetrable gradually (only 20 pages in, so we'll see) has come to seem like a distinct and confident narrative voice, a world and view unto itself - and isn't that what all great (or most great) writing does - gets us to experience the world from the point of view or consciousness of another, establishes a way of writing, a vision, that is unique to that author - in the same way that a great composer's work is easily identifiable from a few phrases, or a painter's from a glimpse of a single canvas? I have to say that The Ambassadors, circa 1900, is about as late in James as I'll ever go - I've tried with no success at all to read the latest James - the Golden Bowl, the wings of the dove - his style in his latest years becomes so wrapped in itself as to slow the novel from slow to glacial to stasis and to smother the life out of it. Ambassadors has a touch of that - its far more sinuous that Portrait of a Lady or Princess Cassamassima, both of which I recently read or re-read. He becomes ever more difficult - and ever more distinct - as his career progresses (analogous to Beethoven's quartets?) - and much pleasure as I get out of his novels I continue to think that he worked best within the constraints of what he might call short stories but would call novellas: Turn of the screw, aspern papers, for two examples. If you can plunge in and get used to the cold temperature, there's a lot to gain from near-late James, however: he does a great job setting up the tensions among characters in Ambassadors right from the start, and the scene is seething with repressed and misdirected sexual energy and ambiguities, whether James even knew this or not.