Portrait of a portrait artist

In "The Art of Fiction," Henry James advises the beginning novelist, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!" Unfortunately, much of James's insight is now lost on us. He grows more revered and unread with each passing decade. Shifting tastes, including a century of sensory overload, have rendered his social and emotional precision almost invisible. Students still struggle through his ghost story, "Turn of the Screw," but he's otherwise drifted off high school reading lists. When forced to confront "Portrait of a Lady" or "The Ambassadors," college students find him effete, boring, obsessed with irrelevant issues of class structure and manners. It doesn't help that we pretend there is no class structure in America; there are certainly no manners.

James was not unaware of the problem of finding an audience. His older brother William, the legendary psychologist at Harvard, suggested that his novels were insipid and priggish. His effort to take London by storm led to one of the most disastrous opening nights in theatrical history. He depended on the family fortune to sustain him when - frequently - writing couldn't.

Whatever his struggles for an audience, he enjoyed particularly good fortune in attracting a biographer. Leon Edel spent the better part of his career chronicling James's life in five volumes, which won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

And now James has seduced a novelist commensurate with his own sensibilities. "The Master," a new biographical novel by Irishman Colm Tóibín, reflects all the brilliance and challenge of Henry James's work, sweeping through the author's life and mind with a scope that's both broad and precise. It's not likely to win any new fans for James, but lapsed ones should feel roused by it, and members of the cult will embrace "The Master" as a new testament.

Tóibín narrates in the omniscient third person, focused on James's perspective, a kind of "What Henry Knew." The carefully labeled chapters, starting with "January 1895" through "October 1899," belie the novel's extraordinarily complex and fluid structure.

Tóibín seems to have memorized the voluminous journals, letters, and published works of the whole eccentric James clan, allowing him to re-create conversations and interior monologues with remarkable fidelity. He enjoys total command of the decades that were the foundation for these five years, and tends to refer to events and people long before they've been clearly identified for us. Indeed, anyone less familiar with James's life, which is likely to include everyone but Leon Edel, will experience periods of bewilderment, but for those with the stamina to persevere, the rewards here are extraordinary.

The novel opens in London during preparations for "Guy Domville," a play James wrote when he sensed (incorrectly) that his days as a novelist were over. "He awaited the opening night," Tóibín writes, "with a mixture of pure optimism - an absolute certainty that the play would hit home - and a deep anxiety, a sense that worldly glamour and universal praise would never be offered him."

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