“Idiosyncratic” could be a part of the definition of “best” when it comes to scholarly or critical monographs because they are always expressions of an individual mind that cannot be duplicated by others. In Henry James studies, nobody can write or teach J. Hillis Miller's way other than J. Hillis Miller. Only Eric Savoy can read, write, and teach like Eric Savoy. Only Sharon Cameron can read and think and write what Cameron reads, thinks, and writes. This holds too for great readers and teachers of James whose names we know, such as Dorothea Krook, F. O. Matthiessen, and R. P. Blackmur, but whose work many of us have forgotten. Lynda Zwinger's Telling in Henry James is likewise superb as well as idiosyncratic. Zwinger opens the book with an overview of how her way of reading differs from others. But for me, idiosyncratic as it is, the Telling in Henry James is rarely anything if not inspired and exciting. While a sentence here and a paragraph there might engage less than one before, the book is not easy to put down. Zwinger's main emphases about James's fiction – and his nonfiction as well, I believe – cannot, must not, be forgotten.

Following her “Introduction,” in which she overviews her approach to reading James, Zwinger organizes Telling in Henry James in six chapters. All of the chapters develop the main point about the fiction that James's stylistic oddness, excesses, extras, and “dirt” (Zwinger's term) engage readers in the experience itself of reading fiction, and also mark James's art as a fiction writer. For if, as James contends in “The Art of Fiction,” the literary artist is the one on whom nothing is lost, then the pages of fiction produced by that artist must contain, one way or another, all that had been captured. Zwinger reminds us that for James “[f]iction is the art of losing nothing … and particles of reality, a congeries of miscellaneous detritus, are suspended in the web of experience” (9). Telling in Henry James, then, succeeds at teaching James's “theory not of fiction, but of the art that is fiction” (6).

James's fiction for Zwinger is not about representing the actual world, but in creating an artful experience of reading the novel itself. The experience of the fiction is what happens when readers find themselves “caught” in James's “web” of experience. Thus in the spiderweb passage in “The Art of Fiction,”

Each chapter reads James's “art that is fiction” in a different James text. The first discusses “The Art of Fiction” as a way to establish the basis of Zwinger's way of reading James. The chapter then examines “The Turn of the Screw” (1898) and “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) to introduce some of her reading practices that are relevant for the book. The second chapter takes up The Europeans (1878). The third studies “The Pupil” (1891), the fourth The Golden Bowl (1904) and the fifth “The Jolly Corner” (1908). The sixth chapter situates Zwinger's approach to reading James in relation to that in Sharon Cameron's Thinking in Henry James (1989) and in J. Hillis Miller's Literature as Conduct (2005) (both Cameron and Miller, like Zwinger, read the out-of-place, the unexpected, thus the artful detail). The sixth chapter returns to “The Art of Fiction” and visits James's essay “Anthony Trollope.”

Telling in Henry James is deceptively dense. Its density is deceptive because the book reads easily, is written rather colloquially, is almost always entertaining, and is short. At the same time, because Zwinger's “close readings” are so much her own and work deliberately to resist received taxonomies that for Zwinger prevent readers from thinking about and thus recognizing how James's narrative captures and conveys the experience of fiction, Telling in Henry James is also rewarding because it easily bears repeated reading. Careful reading of Zwinger is important because of Zwinger's own reading of James, which attends to narrative elements that don't “fit” or are, another way, “dirt[y]” or “out of place” (15). Conventional ways of thinking about narrative won't work for Zwinger because they can't account for James's excesses, which both resist the neatness of those conventions and also are crucial to the art of his fiction. Thus, “Taxonomies, by definition and however they are first developed, are a kind of inevitable (pre)organizing of what is seen – and therefore what can be seen – and so, necessarily and inherently, omit whatever might fall into the interstices of naming” (13). What characterizes, “tells,” “tips-off” James's art “are the incongruent, peripatetic, and eruptive textual gestures lying outside homogenizing labels – gestures, that is, by which James addresses or manifests the complexities of telling” (15–16, original emphasis). Those gestures “induce readers to receive the full ‘impression’ of James's texts” (16 n. 7). Thus they establish points of orientation for Zwinger's close readings. They offer a way to understanding the nature of James's narrative style, his “telling,” itself. “It is the attention paid to these oddments that enables our ability to see the silken thread of Henry James's fiction, which like any other kind of art is not ‘about’ something; it is something” (22, original emphasis). For the

For Zwinger, finally, what matters most in reading Henry James is the experience we gain from the pleasures of the text (74).