Tóibín, Colm. The Master. New York: Scribner, 2005.

My first novel of 2007 was very, very good, but strange in its plot structure. I'll warn you now after that last sentence that I've done zero writing of any kind in more than two weeks and, thus, am rusty.

What I mean is this. The Master is, you may assume, about Henry James, specifically the Henry James of 1895-1900, after he's written all his famous books and is now trying to decide where to go in middle-age. It's also about Henry James the 54-year-old virgin. Now, knowing this, it seems that if the novel were a more traditional one, it would move toward James writing The Golden Bowl, or whatever great work came out in 1900-1901. It would, like, end with this novel's publication and, its being lauded or vilified would serve as a kind of comment, or point toward a theme. And/or, the novel would end with James actually allowing himself an intimate sexual experience with another man, which Tóibín implies James has always wanted.

This novel ends with neither, nor does it end with the availability of either, but the, for whatever reason, eventual rejection of such. It ends with Henry entertaining his brother William and family at his new home in the English countryside. In fact it's never clear what exactly James wants, and so he's hardly a traditional protagonist, moving toward an attaining of that thing he wants. We're meant to understand that James wants sex with men, but James won't ever admit to himself that this is what he wants, or would perhaps like for a time. So the novel just progresses, and mostly in James's head. There's absolutely no indication of where the story's headed at any given time.

It's, thus, probably a lot like a James novel, I guess, it being quite some time since I've read James.

Here's something from the only page I dogeared, and it should be known that I never dogear the pages of the books I own, because I am precious and dull. In this scene, James is composing a story, and has just decided to insert into it an object from his own life—his brother Wilky's festering blanket with which he came home, injured, from the war. And really what's incredible about this book is the way Tóibín is able to dramatize the wholly internal action of "thinking out" a story while writing it. It's almost magic.

The feeling of power was new to him. This raid on his own memories, this parading of an object so close to him, so deeply part of his own personal story that no one might ever know where this moment in his story came from, made him believe that he had done something daring and original. Now in the night, he wrote in this room in a rented house in the city, with his parents asleep close by, and his brother William and his sister Alice and his aunt Kate also sleeping, Bob still at war, and Wilky returned once more to his regiment. And none of them, not even himself, was aware of what he had embarked on, what he had discovered as he wrote.

The H.J. of this novel is an H.J. who creates seemingly 85 percent of his fiction from real life, real people he's known, altered only slightly in name and circumstance as they enter onto his pages. It's been a very helpful and enlightening read for someone who thinks that taking even five percent from real life is simple, dirty cheating.