Previously in this series.
1. You’ve done something in a piazza that renders you unfit for polite company.
2. Either your taste is impeccable and everything you touch becomes a magisterial work of art or your taste is atrocious and everyone who visits your house is horrified into a terse silence.
3. You once had to speak to a Jew and the recollection of it both thrills and disgusts you.
4. Much of your time is spent writing long, abusive letters to people you love from places you hate.
5. Your deepest secret is already known by the one person you are most invested in keeping it from, who also believes that he or she is keeping the same secret from you. You have tea together twice a week and strong ideas about each other’s biscuits.
6. You’ve come to a devastating resolution on a train.
7. You’ve spent the morning at the offices of an anarchist newspaper and the evening at an excessively lavish dinner.
8. You have a burning longing for someone that, if acted upon, would violate every ideal upon which you’ve meticulously built your fraught existence.
9. In colloquial Italian, your name means something unspeakable.
10. For the past several years you’ve been having a sexual relationship with someone who is a stranger to you, perhaps literally.
11. You regret having sat for a painting but bridle at the thought of photography.
12. You’ve met an aristocrat who is about to change everything for you.
13. You are an aristocrat who sees everyone else as an early Christian in the coliseum of your twisted fantasy life.
14. You’ve found yourself uncomfortably wrestling between the suffocating pretense of the continent and the aesthetic banality of the new world while selecting a traveling dress.
15. You are driven by a single, indiscernible desire.
16. If your time were your own, you’d spend all of it waiting for visitors to lie to about not being in.
17. By all appearances you are in the process of courting an attractive, age-appropriate foreigner but you actually harbor an ardent desire for an older relative.
18. If only someone would die, you’d get everything you’ve ever wanted.
19. Though you are preternaturally wise for your tender years, you are incapable of anticipating how your world is about to be irrevocably shattered.
20. English is your first and primary language, but, comme cela se trouve, you frequently employ French to communicate sarcasm.
21. You may be someone else who the narrator is referring to and you may also be yourself; it is impossible to say at this juncture just who “you” are.
22. You finally get everything you’ve ever wanted—in such a way that exposes the deepest faults in your nature and lays bare a world of treachery, deceit, and cheaply made furnishings.
Tags: arielle zibrak, books, henry james, how to tell what novel you’re in
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THIS IS THE BEST ONE YET
23. I have chucked you across the room while muttering, “Life’s too goddamned short,” before stomping outside and wishing I owned Crocs merely because I know it would have made you shudder.
(Protip: When rectifying gaps in one’s literary education, do not try to double up on D.H. Lawrence and immediately wash it down with Henry James.)
You simply must do Edith Wharton next.
I think the illustration actually is from House of Mirth…
I feel like at least 50% of these could apply directly to Wharton. (Not including the banner image, haha.)
Having never finished a Henry James (I’ll try again I promise), I gotta say it works perfectly well as a Wharton list.
I was going to say exactly the same thing. I’m glad someone beat me to it ;).
Alternatively: Dirtbag Newland Archer.
Because he WAS.
Newland Archer is the Absolute Worst.
16. If your time were your own, you’d spend all of it waiting for visitors to lie to about not being in.
*incinerates five-year plan, reverently lays this sentence in its place*
Can we get away with using this in job interviews?
Number 15 is completely perfect, the capsule summary of every Henry James novel and story ever. (I say this with great affection because I have a deep and reverent love for Henry James that 6 years of grad school couldn’t burn out of me.)
I’m excited about how I can now add, “But I’m in a Henry James novel” to justify #4 and #20.
Piazza, 7-11…. same difference, right?
24. You keep a museum of beautiful objects and your most prized exhibit is your young and lovely wife.
25. You are painfully stupid but have AWESOME handwriting.
Which novel is #17? And these are all amazing; my favourite so far.
I think it might be Portrait of a Lady? To be honest, I had such a hard time getting through Wings of the Dove that I’ve settled for movie adaptations of his books ever since.
“7. You’ve spent the morning at the offices of an anarchist newspaper and the evening at an excessively lavish dinner.”
okay this I have done
1. This is great.
2. This is the first time I’ve had the impulse to respond to one of these ‘how to tell’ pieces as if they were the setup for a text-based rpg.
>Reupholster cheaply made furnishings
Many wow; much LOLs.
Number 11 made me think of Dorothea and Casaubon in Italy in Middlemarch, and I just had this intense shiver of joy of suddenly remembering another brilliant little scene of that brilliant book, one I hadn’t thought about in months.
It's The Golden Bowl, I think: Maggie marries an Italian prince but would prefer to hang out with Dad.
You dump your smothering older lover for a complete douche, to your lasting regret. To her lasting regret, your ex never gets to say “I told you so.”
Someone you feel very close to is currently or was recently deceiving you for the express gain of a third party.
I am basically forwarding this to all the book nerds I know…
There is nothing in your pockets, but you cannot keep your hands from apparently meaningfully fiddling about in them anyway.
One day, one day, I will achieve #16.
so pretty women in picture
I think it may be Portrait of a Lady? Frankly, I had such some major snags overcoming Wings of the Dove that I’ve settled for motion picture adjustments of his books from that point onward.
14 is my life, assuming that by travelling dress you mean saturday night Netflix selection.
14 is my life, assuming that by travelling dress you mean saturday night Netflix selection.
So so great!
Somewhere in each novel, amidst the clause-laden and virtually impenetrable verbiage, and in the wake of an unforgivable faux pas — perhaps one forgot one’s place and exhorted rather too wildly for Italy, say, or Art or the puissant leaves pressed against the gazebo, as if summer would have it’s green way with one — at that precise moment The Master will indulge himself in a bit of racy slang and allow a character to “hang fire” — the result of which is a calculated frisson, for reader and rider both, which changes everything and not for the better.