Master (Toibin)

Book Reviews
Toibin's impersonation of James works beautifully. The prose is appropriately grave and wistful, the sentences stately without being ponderous, the descriptions at once precise and evocative. The action, such as it is, moves smoothly from a time of temporary desolation to memories of horrible physical and mental suffering to angst-filled comedy (James dithering about how to deal with two drunken servants, James uncertain about how to dispose of the dresses of a dead woman). Toibin focuses on his subject in the years between 1895, when James's play "Guy Domville" was hooted on its opening night, and 1899, when his elder brother William came to visit at Lamb House, his beloved residence in Rye. But in between Toibin recreates scenes from James's childhood, offers a subtle interpretation of the apparent back injury—the so-called great "vastation"—that kept him out of the Civil War and helped make him an artist, and systematically introduces many of the people important in the writer's life.
Michale Dirda - Washington Post

Whatever Toibin's literary-critical and ideological interest in James, The Master is unquestionably the work of a first-rate novelist—one who has for the past decade been writing excellent novels about people cut off from their feelings or families or both.
Daniel Mendelsohn - New York Times

Toibin's enthralling novel displays-in a manner that is masterly-the wit and metaphorical flair, psychological subtlety and phrases of pouncing incisiveness with which a great novelist captured the nuances of consciousness and duplicities of society.
Sunday Times (London)

It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what Toibin, highly talented Irish author of The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, has ventured here, with a remarkable degree of success. The book is a fictionalized study, based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclipsed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde. Thereafter the book ranges seamlessly back and forth over James's life, from his memories of his prominent Brahmin family in the States including the suicide of his father and the tragic early death of his troubled sister Alice to his settling in England, in a cherished house of his own choosing in Rye. Along the way it offers hints, no more, of James's troubled sexual identity, including his fascination with a young English manservant, his (apparently platonic) night in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes and his curious obsession with a dashing Scandinavian sculptor of little talent but huge charisma. Another recurrent motif is James's absorption in the lives of spirited, highly intelligent but unhappy young women who die prematurely, which helped to inform some of his strongest fiction. The subtlety and empathy with which Toibin inhabits James's psyche and captures the fleeting emotional nuances of his world are beyond praise, and even the echoes of the master's style ring true. Far more than a stunt, this is a riveting, if inevitably somewhat evasive, portrait of the creative life. Forecast: This is too subtly shaded and leisurely for some fiction readers, but James's many admirers will be drawn to its many insights and its uncanny recreation of his world.
Publishers Weekly

Dublin journalist, travel book writer, and novelist (his Blackwater Lightship was short-listed for the 1999 Booker Prize), Toibin here turns a life-long obsession with Henry James into a scrupulously researched and artfully rendered biographical novel. Fear not, fervent Jamesians, no attempt has been made to imitate the master's inimitable style. Even when the narrator takes us inside the mind of James, circa 1890s, Toibin's prose is largely straightforward even as the subject matter discursively wanders the streets and beau monde residences of Paris, Dublin, London, Rome, Venice, and James's English home, Lamb House, in Rye, Sussex. From the subtle machinations of James's closeted homoerotic sensibilities, to his intense friendships with both men and women, to his angst over the notorious failure of his only performed drama, Toibin excels at showing us (not telling us, as James himself advised in his seminal essay, "The Art of Fiction") the connections between James's life and his fictional oeuvre. Highly recommended for most fiction and all literary fiction collections. —Mark Andr Singer, Mechanics' Inst. Lib., San Francisco
Library Journal

(Starred review) Even the reader who knows little about Henry James or his work can enjoy this marvelously intelligent and engaging novel, which presents not on a silver platter but in tender, opened hands a beautifully nuanced psychological portrait. —Brad Hooper
Booklist

The Irish author finds a great subject in the life and sensibility of ineffably cosmopolitan American author Henry James. Focusing on several of James's "middle years" (the late 1890s), Toibin creates an increasingly affecting picture of a great writer so devoted to and immured in his art that his very life comes to seem to him "a story that had not yet been written." Moving backward and forward in time, the novel begins with the disastrous opening night of the middle-aged James's play Guy Domville (its audience booed him off the stage), then juxtaposes memories of the author's earlier years with travels to beloved European places and his decision to reside henceforth in England. There are generously detailed flashbacks to Henry's youth among a cultivated itinerant family presided over by portentous Swedenborgian idealist Henry James Senior; the lifelong frailty and early death of Henry's acerbically witty sister Alice; the ordeal of the Civil War, from which he was spared (though his younger brothers were not) by a possibly imaginary illness; and his politely adversarial relationship with his prickly older brother, the accomplished psychologist-philosopher, William James. The advancing narrative concentrates on Henry's frustrating friendships with attractive younger men (manifestations of a sexual hunger he fastidiously declined to satisfy), and chance meetings and overheard gossip that Toibin—often quite ingeniously—shows to have inspired such mature masterpieces as The Aspern Papers, The Golden Bowl, and The Turn of the Screw. And, in the book's most plaintive chapters, Toibin traces Henry's affectionate friendships with his vibrant cousin Minny Templre and globe-trotting American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson—both of whom died young, arguably of hearts broken by Henry's withdrawals from them and into the world of his own imagination. A somewhat stately novel that will appeal most to readers who admire James's subtle, stylistically rich, demanding prose. As such, it's a formidably brilliant performance.
Kirkus Reviews