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Henry James Week: The Digested Read: The Golden Bowl by John Crace

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Download The Digested Read from guardian.co.uk

Guardian.co.uk, 15 August 2009
 
It takes a peculiar sensibility to demonstrate a lack of responsiveness to Jamesian prose.  John Crace achieves this in a so-called "comic" podcast, where he tries - and singularly fails - to make fun of The Golden Bowl.  The "text" includes deliberately self-conscious references to the length of the novel, in which "pages and pages" have been taken up with "meaningless introspection," with the characters not doing much except reflecting on their actions.  The podcast summarizes the plot of the novel, but reveals the podcaster's basic contempt for it in a coda which describes it as "a load of Golden Bowlocks."
 
I sometimes wonder quite what the point might be of producing material like this.  Those who have engaged with The Golden Bowl would probably press the 'Stop' button before the seven-minute long podcast finished, while those who believe that the novel is simply "Golden Bowlocks," as Crace claims, would probably not be interested in the podcast anyway.  Maybe we might most charitably describe it as narcissistic exercise in self-promotion.