In case people are interested, the Wells novel referenced in the piece, _Boon_, is available on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34962/34962-h

In case people are interested, the Wells novel referenced in the piece, _Boon_, is available on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34962/34962-h/34962-h.htm#fourth https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34962/34962-h/34962-h.htm#fo... It includes a pretty amusing mockery of Henry James's style, which is very very very inwardly focused: > The gist is that Mr. Blandish wants a house to live in and that he has an idea of the kind of house he wants. And the chapter, the long, unresting, progressing chapter, expands and expands; it never jumps you forward, it never lets you off, you can’t skip and you can’t escape, until there comes at last a culminating distension of statement in which you realize more and more clearly, until you realize it with the unforgettable certainty of a thing long fought for and won at last, that Mr. Blandish has actually come upon the house and with a vigour of decision as vivid as a flash of lightning in a wilderness of troubled clouds, as vivid indeed as the loud, sonorous bursting of a long blown bladder, has said ‘This is it!’ On that ‘This is it’ my chapter ends, with an effect of enormous relief, with something of the beautiful serenity that follows a difficult parturition. > “The story is born. > “And then we leap forward to possession. > “‘And here he was, in the warmest reality, in the very heart of the materialization of his dream——’ He has, in fact, got the house. For a year or so from its first accidental discovery he had done nothing but just covet the house; too fearful of an overwhelming disappointment even to make a definite inquiry as to its accessibility. But he has, you will gather, taken apartments in the neighbourhood, thither he visits frequently, and almost every day when he walks abroad the coveted house draws him. It is in a little seaside place on the east coast, and the only available walks are along the shore or inland across the golf-links. Either path offers tempting digressions towards it. He comes to know it from a hundred aspects and under a thousand conditions of light and atmosphere…. Henry James's _The Golden Bowl_ and a few other of his late novels are kind of a miracle of art, as in it's miraculous that they exist and nothing else really resembles them outside of maybe Proust!