I’m reading Henry James’s late unfinished novel The Sense of the Past for the book I’m writing, and while my opinion of Henry James as a writer is not relevant to my use of his story, I just want to go on record saying that there is no writer who frustrates me more than Henry James in his later period. I find Joyce’s Ulysses – dammit, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake – easier to read and to make sense of than the prose of Henry James in his later period. When I read one of James’s sentences I often feel that it was created by an algorithm that has been fed a list of English words classified by part of speech and an extensive set of grammatical rules — but has been given no information about what the words mean. Here is a representative — note: representative, not unusual, not exaggerated — sentence from The Sense of the Past: “Just these high considerations were in all probability the influence most active in his attitude toward the only approach to an adverse interest with which he was to perceive himself confronted.“ Just for fun, here’s another one: “He had even for this one of those rarest reaches of apprehension on which he had been living and soaring for the past hour and which represented the joy he had just reasseverated; impatience was surely one of her bright marks, but he saw that to live with her would be to find her often deny it in ways unforeseen and that seemed for the moment to show themselves as the most delightful things in nature.” I read sentences like these and think I’m developing some rare and deadly form of aphasia.