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2026
Reviews 2026-1

Peter Brooks, Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age

New York Review Books, 2025. Pp. 248. ISBN: ‎168137921X
Vinayak Dewan
Bibliographical reference

New York Review Books, 2025. Pp. 248. ISBN: ‎168137921X

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1James came to the United States in search of the romantic that once drove him to Europe but no longer resided there for him. After an exile of 25 years, he was back in an America on the brink of an economic boom. In Henry James Comes Home, Brooks charts James’s journey as a writer coming to terms with the United States and the American democracy. While at Lamb House, his home in Rye, Sussex, James wrote in a letter to Grace Norton that “The days depart and pass, laden somehow like processional camels—across the desert of one’s solitude” (James, Henry James: Letters Volume IV 1895-1916 299–300); he identifies the male crowd at the foot of the New York skyscrapers with a similarly melancholic “universal will to move—to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any price” (James, The American Scene 84)—an example of what Brooks calls James’s theory of American life.

2In the process of disarming his brother’s protest against the American trip, he called it “my one little ewe-lamb of possible exotic experience” (James, Henry James: Letters Volume IV 1895-1916 271). After years abroad, his home had become exotic—a double exile making him an alien at home. James tried to mask his American voyage as a quest for a profitable novel, citing greater literary interest in “human Anglo-Saxondom, with the American extension” (James, Henry James: Letters Volume IV 1895-1916 271). Viewing the argument for practicality as a cover for something more passionate, Brooks calls this a real nostos, a drive to revisit something decidedly familiar after a prolonged exile. When we visit our childhood homes, we inhabit both our child and adult selves at the same time. This feeling of arrival, for James, twists the neat binaries of the past and the present. Upon arriving at William James’s rambling estate near West Ossipee, New Hampshire, Henry wrote that in the beauty of the landscape, “I am finding again my old (young) eyes & imagination, & it is rather exquisite” (James, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Letters: 1900-1915 37). Emerging from the berth of the ship, it is only too easy to recollect the past: “only too confoundingly familiar and too serenely exempt from change, the waterside squalor of the great city put forth its most inimitable notes, showed so true to the barbarisms it had not outlived that one could only fall to wondering what obscure inward virtue had preserved it” (James, The American Scene 1). He cannot, even after years of separation, escape the perversions he associates with home. The verbal densities and rhetorical puzzles of James’s prose tend to resolve themselves when you read it aloud. Brooks suggests that it may have been more easily understood upon hearing than upon reading.

3James describes skyscrapers as “extravagant pins in a cushion already over-planted, and stuck in as in the dark, anywhere and anyhow” (James, The American Scene 39). Skyscrapers stand in for American forms. A “city standing straight up, ‘so hard it made you afraid’ ” (Louis Ferdinand Céline qtd. in Brooks 39), early 20th century New York City is an “erection” (Brooks 39) based on the classical tripartite column, with base, shaft, and capital, though still far prettier than the steel skeletons of today. The modern city is a collective artwork produced by the city’s residents, past and present, self and other. The modernity coming into being with the arrival of the American scene, at the moment of James’s encounter with his old self, needed a new language. James reached out into his estranged past and tried to reacquaint himself, in search for that new register, by making his old and young selves speak to one another in the context of the built reality around him: an artificial microcosm consisting of simply anonymous lives led behind windows.

4American materialism is one explanation Brooks offers for the confounding disjuncture between James’s past and present. “Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid” (Henry Adam qtd. in Brooks 18)—creating an “expensively provisional” consumer culture (James, The American Scene 77)—an allusion to what we might call planned obsolescence today. James excoriates the villas built by and for the newly rich as having no relation to any system of manners nor any system of values. James stages himself as “he who will ‘gouge’ the interest out of the seeming void. If the American scene appears bland and unmeaning, he will extract its true significances” (Brooks 17). In his American travel writing, James pointed out a problem Americans have never solved, then or since: that from the slatternly towns James saw from his train window to contemporary strip malls, interstates, and junkyards, all are the results of the despoiling of virgin land by American construction. He found that “leaving everything in the country to the whims of capitalism and the market, to the wishes of the winners in the struggle for wealth and power, comes at the price of the desecration of civilized intercourse, urban amenity, a pleasingly ordered landscape” (Brooks 68).

5As an alternative to the seedy and ravenous capitalism, James sees America as an empty canvas to be filled by the imagination, a palimpsest which comes alive upon revisiting, an empty gap to be filled: “any common sequestered spot, could strike one as the more exquisitely and ideally Sicilian, Theocritan, poetic, romantic, academic, from their not bearing the burden of too much history” (James, The American Scene 14). The sense of creation comes from the scarcity of preestablished narratives. Perhaps Americans, too, have created big commercial and industrial structures to make up for a lack of history, taking into their own hands the building of a civilizational prestige which history has not quite provided. In the absence of “too much history,” the burden falls on the viewer/narrator to create stories, which are, in the case of James, extraordinary and psychological; the nostos combines with algia (pain) to give nostalgia.

6If in Hawthorne, James has famously militated against the lack of history in America, especially its countryside, here Brooks offers that sequestered spot as a fertile ground rather than a wasteland. As recorded in The American Scene, James’s reaction upon arriving at the Hoboken piers is not quite the abject and craven terror he anticipated; he feels “instant vibrations” referring to “a past recalled from very far back … absurdly finding it again … in the chaos of confusion and change” (James, The American Scene 1). The striking cover art by George Bellows (Men of the Docks, 1912), showcases four figures deboarding from a recently arrived ship at Brooklyn, New York City, against “the great face of New York” on which “nature and science were joyfully romping together” (James, The American Scene 73).

7“One story is good only till another is told, and sky-scrapers are the last word of economic ingenuity only till another word be written. This shall be possibly a word of still uglier meaning” (James, The American Scene 77). The architect/writer’s role, therefore, is not merely to observe but to be immersed in the very scene he wishes to objectively document. James sees himself as a reflective observer or “restless analyst” (James, The American Scene 7) with a prerogative to find value or a narrative amidst a chaos of confusion and change. Brooks helps us see that James refuses to adhere to any fixed standpoint, “one of the most disorienting features of The American Scene when one first comes to it” (Brooks 194). No matter how fierce and sophisticated the observation powers of the narrator, when thrown into a space which is an extension of their childhood selves, the process of surveying the childhood home involves rebuilding oneself. “James is not content with impressions alone; he is after something more analytic, which can often take imagistic form as he pushes towards a more comprehensive understanding, even towards a ‘theory’ of American life” (Brooks 196).

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Bibliography

Brooks, Peter. Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age. New York Review Books, 2025.

James, Henry. Henry James and Edith Wharton, Letters: 1900-1915. Scribner’s, 1990.

———. Henry James: Letters Volume IV 1895-1916. Harvard University Press, 1984.

———. The American Scene. Chapman and Hall, 1907, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/68717/pg68717-images.html.

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References

Electronic reference

Vinayak Dewan, Peter Brooks, Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded AgeEuropean journal of American studies [Online], Book reviews, Online since 07 April 2026, connection on 06 May 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/25718; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/166fx

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Vinayak Dewan

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