If you can grope your way through late James, you’ll find you have moved out of the Victorian era into the modern and, beyond that, into what we have come to refer to as the postmodern.

Over at the Smart Set, Paula Marantz Cohen makes the argument that the difficult, late-period Henry James was “too modern to be a modernist,” that the stylized difficulty, themes, and indeterminacy make James’s late period one of proto-postmodernism.