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A few weeks ago, I finished reading the Library of America’s six-volume, sixty-eight-hundred-page edition of the novels of Henry James. I’m a sucker for completist projects, but this one came about more or less by accident. It took me a couple of years, and I didn’t undertake it in an especially devoted or systematic way. I had always considered James one of my favorite writers, largely on the basis of a few long novels (“The Portrait of a Lady,” “The Ambassadors”) and short stories (“The Aspern Papers,” “The Figure in the Carpet”). But I knew him less well than any other figure in my personal canon. Once you’ve gotten beyond the bright constellation of the major works, it can be hard to know where to go with James’s writing; there’s so much of it, and no one seems to agree on what’s what. James himself tried to address the problem late in life, with the revised “New York Edition” of his writing. But this only complicated matters, because he left out some of his best work, including “Washington Square.”

My solution to the quandary was to start at the beginning. The first volume of the Library of America collection contains two curiosities (“Watch and Ward,” which I’m not sure I’d even heard of before, and “Confidence,” which is enjoyable but slight) and three great novels (“Roderick Hudson,” “The American,” and “The Europeans”). These books might surprise some readers who know James only by reputation, or from working to untangle the baroque sentences of one of his late masterpieces in a college English course. They are recognizably nineteenth-century comedies of manners, written in a relatively straightforward style. There is plenty of plot—if anything, they tend toward the melodramatic—along with a good deal of humor. But they do share one characteristic with the mature classics: the obvious care with which they were constructed. Notwithstanding James’s reputation for overworking his material—“he chewed more than he bit off,” goes the famous complaint—you never have the feeling that he is wasting the reader’s time. Every sentence has a purpose, every scene a place in the whole. To put it in Jamesian terms, there is always a governing intelligence at work behind the page. I missed this intelligence when I read novels by other writers, which so often gave me the enervating sense that things were happening for no reason except that it had occurred to the author to make them happen. So I kept returning to James. By the time I’d finished the first volume, I’d bought the second, and I had a pretty good idea that I’d be reading them all.

When I mentioned this plan to friends, their responses fell roughly into two camps. “How impressive,” some said. “Better you than me,” others said. They seemed to take for granted that such a project was an exercise in self-discipline or self-improvement, not something that one did just for fun. But that was exactly why I was doing it. Occasionally, reading James stopped being fun and, when it did, I stopped reading him, sometimes for months at a time. Eventually, I came back, because so few other writers offer the particular pleasures that James does. It’s true that some of the later books are imposing—nineteenth-century realist comedies have given way to twentieth-century modernist monuments. But, precisely because I’d been reading my way through this evolution, I was prepared for the change. I had come to know intimately James’s way of looking at the world, and how it had pushed him toward implication and indirection, so I was in a better position to appreciate (and enjoy) the result.

Of course, the friends who suggested that reading James was an act of self-discipline were just making polite conversation. But I’ve been thinking about those remarks recently, because there has been so much talk of late about what and why we read. The summer began with the usual “beach read” lists, along with the customary beach-read backlash. Then, in June, as the movie adaptation of “The Fault in Our Stars” put John Green’s young-adult novel back at the top of best-seller lists, the critic Ruth Graham wrote, for Slate, that adults should “feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children.” This was obviously meant as a provocation, and it was taken as one. But the nature of the rebuttals differed in telling ways. Some, like Laura Miller, of Salon, defended “The Fault in Our Stars” in particular, suggesting that Graham was misreading a relatively sophisticated book because of its genre label. Others admitted to disliking Green’s novel but insisted that the larger Y.A. category contains plenty of books with all the complexity of grown-up literary fiction. The prevailing response, however, seemed to be less about the books in question than about the principle that people ought to read whatever they feel like reading without being subjected to “book-shaming.”

Just as this discussion was dying down, it reignited in different form, by way of an essay in Vanity Fair about the critical reaction to Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, “The Goldfinch.” Many readers and critics loved the book. Others, including The New Yorker’s James Wood, hated it. (I did too: my longest stretch of reading James in the past two years came directly after the punishing experience of “The Goldfinch.”) Vanity Fair presented this lack of critical consensus as a full-blown culture war, “in which the naysayers believe that nothing less is at stake than the future of reading itself.” And the terms of this war wound up being very similar to the ones laid out by Graham not long before. The problem with “The Goldfinch,” its detractors said, was that it was essentially a Y.A. novel. Vanity Fair quoted Wood as saying that “the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”

Interestingly, very few of the book’s defenders seemed to disagree with this contention. That is to say, nobody, to my knowledge, has made a case for why “The Goldfinch” is in fact a work of adult art, rather than a novel aimed at teen-agers. In a remark typical of the book’s advocates, the novelist and Time book critic Lev Grossman—a vocal champion of a world in which adults go around reading “Harry Potter”—said, “Her language is careless in places, and there’s a fairy-tale quality to the book. There’s very little context in the book—it’s happening in some slightly simplified world.” Grossman suggested that how well a novel is written doesn’t matter much anymore, and that a critic like Wood, preoccupied as he is with “literary analysis,” lacks “the critical language you need to praise a book like The Goldfinch.”

Lingering in such conversations is the assumption—shared on all sides—that the novel began its life as a popular, even naïve, form of entertainment, before being transformed by modernism into an impressive but somewhat uninviting high art. Grossman has called elsewhere for an end to the “hundred-year carbonite nap” into which Modernism lulled the form. And one way of understanding this is as a call for a return to the novel as it existed before James came along.