In the opening page of her latest effort, Martha Banta invokes a “sigh” and a “call to courage” in order to face “yet another book on Henry James” (1). Disclosing a special consideration for readers, the appeal builds on the ironic awareness of a well-known fact, almost a cliché: Henry James, the Master, is the object of an impressive and unabated critical revival, which since the 1970s has turned him into the highly trafficked crossroads of a multiplicity of perspectives that range (to name only a few) from philosophy to popular culture, from discourses of identity to economics. To such an extraordinary scholarly output Banta has contributed substantially, since the publication in 1972 of a groundbreaking study that explored the author's relationship with spiritualism and psychical research.Footnote ¹

Now, Banta's lifelong dedication to James turns to one of the fundamental themes of the Jamesian experience: the condition and feeling of being an alien, un-belonging to any specific place in the world. The chosen point of departure, the biblical story of Ruth, is as unusual as it is inspiring. Is the sense of James's existence – as an American-born expatriate who made England his home – in any way similar to the parable of the Moabite young widow who chose to go with her mother-in-law to Judah and thereby became a rightful Israelite? Or does it more truthfully resonate with John Keats's version of the story, which depicts a Ruth burdened by homesickness, weeping “amid the alien corn” (3)? As the book's title suggests, Banta has a propensity for the second option, although the crux of the question is not solved once and for all and accompanies the reader to the end, highlighting the complexity of one of the most ancient representations of the migrant's experience: the chosen exile is simultaneously a repository of richness, which, metaphorically speaking, proved to be such in James's case.

Banta bravely and diligently confronts an extensive agenda whose ambitiousness would have frightened a less experienced or less knowledgeable scholar. She pursues the threads that tie together James's perception of the “essential loneliness” (5, 10) of his life, which he matured in his late fifties, and the germs of this condition in his recollections of himself as a boy: his intrinsic sense of separateness amidst a large family, his exclusion from the “straight” “brotherhood” (15) headed by his brother William, the reiterated trauma of “dispossession” caused by the family's frequent moves across the ocean; but also his early solitary walks through New York, as well as the intense sensory impressions he derived from them, most notably (foreign) smells. Later, his inability to serve in the American Civil War was a missed experience that undermined his manhood and his official claim to “Americanness,” simultaneously awakening him to a dramatic break in the sense of history as progress and civilization. His powerful insight into the US experience as tragic, however, did not prevent James from lacking all understanding of the plight of freed slaves through the Reconstruction and afterwards.

Banta's hinting at James's vision of African Americans in chapter 1 is indicative of the method she follows throughout the book. Somehow reproducing the jagged quality of James's handling of his autobiographical material, she moves back and forth through different texts and time frames. Many of the issues discussed in Henry James: An Alien's “History” of America are either familiar or vexed questions of Jamesian scholarship, which the author, most of the time, does not raise per se, as the business of critics. Instead, readers often find clear-cut, confident judgments about possibly controversial matters, such as James's “blindness” (28) towards blacks or his being “trapped within the prison of his class” (277). These assessments derive their authority not just from Banta's status as a renowned Jamesian scholar and Americanist, but from her generous, deft summoning of virtually the entire oeuvre by James.

The theme of rapid change is at the core of The American Scene, a travel memoir James wrote upon his return to the US in 1904, and the cornerstone to which Banta keeps gravitating. Yet also her discussion of James's novels is both wide-ranging and extremely analytical, often finely ingrained into the overarching concern for the ways in which the consciousness of inhabiting more than one world informed every angle of the author's existence. As occurs in the chapter on James's “major-phase” novels, the exploration of familiar themes opens up to captivating deviations, such as an in-depth parallel drawn between James and Theodore Dreiser, or a reading of The Golden Bowl (1904) through the metaphor of ballet. Arguably, however, among the book's strongest chapters are those in which Banta engages directly with the historical archives, juxtaposing her inquiry into James with the actual transformations that had taken place in the US from the 1840s (and earlier) to the dawn of the new century.

In a pointed comment in Henry James: An Alien's “History” of America, we read that literary critics who engage Henry James are alternatively “purists” who devote themselves only to the Master, “usurpers” who use him for their own purposes, or “Jamesians who feel free to move to-and-fro in their dual allegiance to James and ‘other matters’” (218). Martha Banta is a bright example of the third category. Although showing a mastery of Jamesian matters worthy of the best “purist,” she places her study of a favorite author in a variety of diverse contexts, proving one more time that through “Henry James” one can gain access to different fields of knowledge and ask questions that are relevant to the writer's time but also to our own moment. The focus on James's “denationalized ‘consciousness’” is perhaps the most precious outcome of this double journey into the author's and America's biography. In a time of tightening national borders and identities (reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt's call to patriotism and “True Americanism”), it reminds us of the possibility to resist the fixed notion of a “national mind,” the very negation, according to James, of the work of consciousness as endless absorption, adaptation, and enrichment.