Even committed fans of Henry James’s novels are sometimes ambivalent about “The Princess Casamassima,” in which a young, impoverished aesthete, Hyacinth Robinson, falls in with a group of would-be revolutionaries and pledges to sacrifice himself to their cause. The book, published in 1886, is an outlier in James’s novelistic output, which consists mostly of understated dramas set among the upper-middle classes, and it was a commercial failure. One might take issue with its perfunctory treatment of the politics that is its supposed theme, or see it as a failed attempt to marry James’s psychological pointillism and exquisite, mannered prose to the sentimentality of Dickens and the naturalism of Zola. But the novel’s Frankenstein quality is a manifestation of what I take to be its real inquiry: the fate of a style of hyper-refined sensibility when confronted with the brutality of a sensationalistic plot.
The book’s melodrama is pronounced: it opens with Hyacinth, as a young child, visiting the prison deathbed of his mother—a French servant woman who murdered her lover, an English lord whom Hyacinth comes to believe was his father. Years later, he meets the princess of the title—a brilliant, impetuous woman whose latest caprice is a flirtation with radical politics—at the theatre. He falls in love, and, once exposed to her refinement, surrounded by her beautiful old things—“things with which the aspirations and the tears of generations have been mixed”—he also falls in love with the artistic culture of the aristocracy, the culture that his radical friends would like to raze to the ground. The pathos of the novel, which I love, lies in the clarity with which Hyacinth sees that the works of art he now treasures are inextricable from the exploitative class system that has made his life miserable.
I thought of “The Princess Casamassima” often as I read Caleb Crain’s second novel, “Overthrow”—even before the novel itself began referencing it. Crain does not rewrite James’s plot, but he does rehearse many of the earlier book’s elements: aesthetes, unlikely revolutionaries, unexpected love. One of Crain’s characters is even called Hyacinth, on occasion—a nickname he was given, we eventually learn, because he reminded one of his friends of James’s protagonist. As the book begins, Matthew, a thirtysomething doctoral student writing a dissertation on “poetic kingship” in sixteenth-century literature, cruises a younger man, Leif, on city streets reminiscent of Brooklyn. (Crain is not specific about time or place in the novel, but readers may be inclined to assume that it is New York City circa 2011.) Their encounter leads not to the sex that Matthew desires but to an apartment where he meets two of Leif’s friends, Elspeth and Raleigh, who soon encourage Matthew to join them in a game involving tarot cards. Matthew hasn’t just been picked up, it turns out, but recruited: Leif and his friends are participants in the Occupy movement. What’s more, they are convinced that they possess psychic abilities which they can use to help their fellow-activists; the game with tarot cards is intended to see if Matthew shares their occult talents. Matthew is bemused but willing; among the many virtues of cruising as a narrative device is that it can dispose a character to play along in uncongenial situations. “Sometimes during a pickup it was advisable to be parsimonious as a diplomat with statements of how much one believed or disbelieved,” Crain writes.
Leif and his friends call themselves the Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings. The “perception of feelings” is a euphemism for telepathy, although what telepathy means in the novel is not entirely clear. For Elspeth, a fact checker and aspiring writer, it is “an alternative means of communication.” Meanwhile Raleigh, a computer programmer, wants to use Leif and Elspeth’s psychic powers—which he lacks—to hack into government and corporate databases and expose their secrets. The working group also includes Chris, a handsome mover who has no esoteric gifts but believes in Leif and Elspeth’s abilities, and Julia, a wealthy, cultured woman who joins after speaking with Raleigh and Matthew at an Occupy protest in a city plaza that calls to mind Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street. During the clearing of the park, the group watches police officers beat a protester “as if he were a nail that they were competing to hammer”; afterward, Leif attempts to psychically hack into the computer of a government contractor by telepathically obtaining his password. It appears to work—but, the next morning, several members of the group are arrested. They are described as threats to national security. The legal complications and media frenzy that result determine the plot of much of what follows.
Point of view shifts between each of the members of the group, with the exception of Leif, “the only one who’s really any good” at telepathy. This allows the novel to remain agnostic about his true abilities, and about its own stance toward psychic powers more generally. When Matthew asks Leif how his gift works, Leif suggests that “it’s a funny kind of metaphor,” in which one of the components of the figure is obscured. One might say the same for the device of psychic powers in the novel. The book variously suggests that it might stand for surveillance, or hacking, or our faltering commitment to privacy, or poetry, or literary criticism (the members of the working group call the ability “reading”), or cruising, or queerness. Or maybe it can represent anything we only sort of believe in: authority, democracy, romantic commitment, human rights.
Most often, though, telepathy seems to stand merely for an unremarkable human faculty. “It’s about admitting that most of the time people are more aware than they’d like to let on of how other people are feeling. That’s all,” Elspeth explains. In this sense, “Overthrow” is of a piece with Crain’s previous books, both of which take as their central concern the quest to alleviate a seemingly inevitable human isolation. His first novel, “Necessary Errors,” was an exquisitely etched, Jamesian bildungsroman about an aspiring novelist teaching English in Prague who is separated from his expatriate friends by his queerness and from his Czech lovers by his foreignness. Apartness, in that book, is something that the protagonist cultivates—it’s a discipline of awareness, a preparatory writerly craft. Crain is also the author of “American Sympathy,” an academic study of male romantic friendship in early American literature. Its subject is how, although “the integrity of our bodies isolates us,” the imaginative faculty of sympathy—“a work of fiction with real effects”—allows us some meaningful access to the experience of others.
Elspeth makes telepathy sound similar. But it is difficult to get from her levelheaded explanation of it to Leif’s conviction that he will be able to telepathically hack into a government computer—and it’s a problem for the effectiveness of the plot that few of the characters seem entirely sure how much they share his conviction. (Only Leif and Chris seem wholeheartedly to believe; the group’s apparent success in divining the contractor’s password will prove a baited trap, but, in other instances, a possibility of extrasensory perception is allowed to hover.) The novel treads a fine line: the characters must be skeptical, so that we can take them seriously; but they must believe in their abilities enough to set the plot in motion, and it’s important for the earnest tone and emotional investments of the book that their belief never seem ridiculous. The result is a plot that never convinces or even, really, coheres.
But plot is very nearly incidental to this novel; all of its real conviction lies in style, which is, in an age suspicious of ornament, defiantly baroque, studded with gratuitous beauties. What would it mean, I found myself asking as I read, to take seriously the idea of prose as a technology for “the refinement of the perception of feelings”? What would it mean to find in such perception the primary drama of a work of fiction? The interest of Crain’s novel, and the source of its powerful emotional hold, resides in the extent to which it provides an answer.
In the introduction to the New York edition of “The Princess Casamassima,” James asserts that “the agents in any drama” are “interesting only in proportion as they feel their respective situations. Their being finely aware—as Hamlet and Lear, say, are finely aware—makes absolutely the intensity of their adventure.” By this measure, Crain’s characters are extreme adventurers. The novel is virtuosic in mining beauty and pathos from the texture of daily life; reading Crain’s prose can feel like seeing a world made hyper-real, crisper and more intense, as through some phenomenological Instagram filter. Blades of grass in the rain tremble “like tines plucked by the rotor of a music box”; a pen twirls in a man’s hand, “unfurling into a pinwheel and then condensing into a pen again”; a chair creaks “as if a cricket had found enough daring for one stridulation.” (The extravagance of that last lies not in “cricket” or even “stridulation,” but in the attribution of “daring.”) The text is peppered with little excurses of wonder:
Crain luxuriates in obscure and outdated words, like “rime” and “filamentous,” or, elsewhere, “subfusc,” “quilped,” “dolichocephalic,” “jaillissant.” Some of this may be a kind of nostalgia; one senses that Matthew speaks for Crain when he admits—echoing James’s “tears of generations”—that “he always felt a little protective of a thing if it spoke of the past.” But, more often, the impression is less of preciousness than of an intelligence jealous of all its resources for precision.
One limitation of such extravagance of style in close third-person narration is that it requires characters who can be imagined to have such words and perceptions in reach. Three of Crain’s point-of-view characters—Matthew, Elspeth, and Julia—are aspiring writers of some kind. In the sections devoted to the others, where the style is more restrained, the novel’s interest slackens. Proportion is a good guide to authorial investment: Elspeth and Matthew’s sections amount to nearly two-thirds of the book. They are given this prominence because they are the novel’s finest perceivers, but also because they are the characters who love Leif most intensely: Leif is the novel’s center of gravity, and his relationship with Matthew, despite its casual start, becomes the book’s primary focus. Matthew’s devotion to Leif grows even as Leif, who feels responsible for the trouble he and his friends find themselves in, loses “the swan’s-neck nonchalance” that had first made him so attractive. In the sections devoted to their relationship, Crain’s style of elevated perception becomes a sharp tool for psychological notation.
Late in the novel, Matthew is returning home with Leif after a meeting with an attorney when he notices a man cruising him on the subway. He is surprised, at first, both because “cruising was one of the analog practices that the internet was rendering obsolete” and because he is so visibly attached to Leif. But the man’s “eyes suggested that he was telling a story about himself in which he didn’t mind that he was misbehaving,” and Matthew is excited by this; he imagines, with pleasure, being subdued by the shoulders and arms the man is showing off. And he imagines the greater pleasure of being free to indulge, as used to be his habit, in “the animal life of the city.” But he turns away from temptation, having instead “chosen to have a name and to be part of a story.”
“She was too beautiful to question, to judge by common logic,” James writes of his princess, and my frustrations with Crain’s beautifully rendered novel finally feel irrelevant in light of such scenes, of what Crain uncovers—the quick delight of “animal life” set against the more burdensome pleasures of bearing a name and a story—as he painstakingly tracks the inner lives of his characters. But psychological acuity alone does not account for the novel’s effect on the reader, which depends more profoundly on the curious plangency of its style. Crain’s sentences themselves, with their jewelled words and carefully curated perceptions, constitute a kind of cri de coeur.
In several passages, the novel’s characters articulate an adversarial posture toward contemporary life. They see themselves as in “a war over perceiving. Over what we’re allowed to perceive,” Leif says. They lodge complaints against the Internet’s “general sloppiness of expression,” which makes the achievement of fine effects—the sorts of effects that are Crain’s aim—more difficult to discern, and against a general intolerance of inwardness. “People get so angry now when they see someone paying more attention to thoughts and feelings than they think thoughts and feelings deserve,” Elspeth says. “It’s like there’s a new sumptuary law against introspection.”
Crain’s style is an implicit partisan in these complaints. It’s easy to imagine Crain being accused of all sorts of indulgences—word-fetishism, attending to irrelevant details, an inadequate concern with the politics of the Occupy movement—but the defiance with which he pursues his idiosyncracies is the book’s primary merit. Matthew, pondering the poet Samuel Daniel, one of the subjects of his dissertation, wonders “if he was interested in Daniel and touched by Daniel’s devotion to his vocation only because he himself, in choosing to write literary criticism, was making a mistake like Daniel’s—giving his life to a kind of writing that was about to pass out of the world.”
It’s hard not to hear authorial anxiety in the question, and there is pathos in Crain’s awareness of the quixotic nature of his project—and of the fact that, considered in conventional terms, it might well be judged irrelevant. Viewed ungenerously, the unconvincing plot elements of cyberespionage and comic-book telepathy might seem a claim to fashionable relevance made on behalf of this decidedly unfashionable book. But, at its best, the novel makes a more difficult, more convincing claim, one I was grateful for in an age obsessed with subject matter: that, in the sharpening of our senses and accoutrement of our sensibilities, the more profound relevance of literature lies in form.
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