We offered them their chance 
Michael Wood
The story opens on a picture of a very large young lady, ‘a truly massive young person’, crossing from one house to another in Newport, Rhode Island, site of ‘florid’ villas and other structures ‘smothered in senseless architectural ornament’. On the verandah of the second house she finds her father, an inordinately rich man, sourly awaiting the death of his former partner, a slightly less rich man. Her father is described as ‘a person without an alternative’, the very worst fate that can befall anyone in a Henry James novel, and all he thinks about is his neighbour’s legacy, or more precisely ‘what old Frank would have done with the fruits of his swindle, on the occasion of the rupture that had kept them apart in hate and vituperation for so many years’.
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Michael Wood teaches at Princeton. His most recent book is Literature and the Taste of Knowledge.
Other articles by this contributor:
Jasmines in the Hallway · García Márquez tells his story
At the Movies · Scorsese
Just one of those ends · Apocalypse Regained
At the Movies · David Cronenberg’s ‘Eastern Promises’
At the Movies · Inside Man and V for Vendetta
At the Movies · Almodóvar
At the Movies · The Devil and Robert Bresson
At the Movies · Michael Wood sees 300
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