Portrait of a portrait artist

Too nervous to watch his own opening, he attends Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" nearby and loathes it. "The writing, line by line, was a mockery of writing," he thinks, "an appeal for cheap laughs, cheap responses." Leaving Wilde's smashing success, he walks back to his own theater in time to receive a torrent of boos and catcalls.

The experience - with its particularly public dimension - devastates him and throws him back into fiction with grim expectations. But Tóibín catches in James's response a mingled sense of humiliation and superiority: "He had failed, he realized, to take the measure of the great flat foot of the public."

Meanwhile, Wilde's spectacular success aggravates his disappointment and envy further (another one of Wilde's plays opens in the theater that "Guy Domville" exits). It also introduces a major theme in "The Master": James's ambiguous sexual orientation, treated here, like everything else in this story, with exquisite subtlety.

James listens hungrily to news of the playwright's outrageous behavior with a strictly enforced air of casual detachment. He's too elegant to gloat over Wilde's trial, too terrified to pant over Wilde's exploits. This portrayal of intense but unarticulated desire is a triumph of wit and psychological precision. Another scene of James lying awake all night next to a naked and presumably straight Oliver Wendell Holmes is even funnier and just as brilliant.

As the novel moves through James's relationships with his sister, his cousin, a friend's butler, and a young sculptor, we see again and again the same tension between his attraction to these people and a desperate need to withhold himself from them. "He found the waiting for them, the sense of expectation before a visit, the most blissful time of all," Tóibín writes. "He also relished the days after the guest had departed, he enjoyed the peace of the house, as though the visit had been nothing except a battle for solitude which he had finally won."

What's most touching, even heart-wrenching, is the way those closest to James accommodate his detachment as the price of his friendship. He and the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, for instance, enjoy a passionate meeting of minds in Italy. But as she sinks deeper into depression, she never dares to ask outright for his help, and he never stoops to answer her veiled cries. In every case, the people who desperately need him allow him to perpetuate the illusion that they're as self-sufficient as he is.

Only as the casualties mount and a few friends have the nerve to confront him with his own ruthlessness is he willing to consider the fear of entanglement that cauterizes his affections.

Tóibín's work displays the kind of depth and sensitivity that few authors can offer - or demand. After all, writing a novel that captures Henry James is like deriving an equation that calculates Albert Einstein. It's an audacious attempt that manages to beat the master at his own game, while avoiding the perils of parody or sycophancy. The result is a beautiful, haunting portrayal that measures the amplitude of silence and the trajectory of a glance in the life of one of the world's most astute social observers.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. E-mailRon Charles.

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