Allow me to name a few items from the category of disappointing works by superior writers: Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop, Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, Tolstoy’s Resurrection, George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such, the fiction of George Orwell apart from Animal Farm and 1984, all the fiction of Samuel Beckett, and, perhaps sadly most disappointing of all, Henry James’s American Scene.

I write sadly most disappointing of all because I am a registered Jamesian, someone who has written in praise of him on a number of occasions, taught him to college students, and argued his case with friends who found him overrated. Some believe that James’s novels exclude too much for him to be taken as a major writer. I am not among them. Others feel that James’s late phase—featuring the novels The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904)—with its complex style and subtle psychology, drifts too far from the realism that is central to the novel at its best. Here, too, I disagree. I find James in his fiction deep, and with much to teach us all; and, an item not often mentioned in connection with him, he is a splendid wit.

All this is by way of saying that when I first came to The American Scene (1907), I did so with the highest expectations. Other writers have taken on the subject of America—the British diplomat James Bryce, Dickens in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Alexis de Tocqueville most splendidly of all—but James’s perspective seemed especially promising. Here was a great novelist who was born and lived his youth in America. After completing The Golden Bowl, which some feel to be his masterwork, he set aside ten months between 1904 and 1905 to visit and recount his impressions of the country that he had departed in 1875 at the age of thirty-two. What could go wrong?

The first thing that went wrong was James’s prose. Lucid when describing the thoughts of his fictional characters, charming in his letters to family and friends, subtle in his literary criticisms, in The American Scene James’s writing is none of these things. The best word to describe it, a word James himself uses in a letter to Edith Wharton, is tarabisotage, which means overly elaborate, fussy, convoluted, over-ornate.

In his introduction to the 1967 edition of The American Scene, Irving Howe characterizes James’s style in the book as “syntax by performance,” adding that “only at a few points does James attempt a prose transparent, simple, and plain, what might be called the style of reportage.” The American Scene is a book the majority of whose paragraphs run to two pages or more. Few of its sentences are free of semicolons, dashes, italics. Explicit statement is too often replaced by unconvincing metaphor. Making the best case of the matter, Howe notes that “even the elaborateness of James’s prose, which has been known to disable inexperienced readers, is a strategy meant to encourage reflection and slow reading.”

After departing to Europe in 1875, James had visited America twice, both times in 1882, the first when his mother died, the second just before the death of his father. But for his 1904 trip, begun at the age of sixty, he had mixed motives. For one, he thought producing a travel book would be of literary interest; for another, while traveling in America, he planned to deliver lectures, chiefly on “The Lesson of Balzac,” for a goodly fee. Money was always a concern for James, and lecturing in America proved to be one way to get it.

As for the book he produced, The American Scene, the novelist John Banville amusingly notes that “if a traveler of the day were to have taken it along as reading matter on the voyage to America, surely he or she, immediately upon disembarkation, would have hurried to the ticket office and booked a return passage on the next sailing.” The fact is that James had little that was pleasing to say about the country of his birth and upbringing, and much in denigration.

Peter Brooks, a fellow Jamesian, holds out greater hope for The American Scene. In his study Henry James Comes Home, Brooks calls the book “a subtle, sometimes exasperating travelogue that constitutes to my mind one of the most penetrating sociological analyses ever written about the United States.” He adds, “The whole of The American Scene will continue to unfold as a figural discourse on the meanings, overt and hidden, of a democratic society—the one and only concrete illustration of what it means to put ‘the people in charge of their own affairs.’” Brooks notes that James remained “very much an American and a believer in the democratic principle. But the action of democracy across the land is not to be accepted without critique by the restless analyst. That’s after all the task he has set himself.”

Throughout The American Scene, James refers to himself as the analyst, but, alas, it is the book’s readers who are more likely to become restless. There is much about him to put up with. James’s anti-Semitism emerges in his pages on immigrants to America. His snobberies crop up throughout. Teddy Roosevelt called James “a miserable little snob”; James called Roosevelt “the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise.” (As putdowns go, James’s is better.) Brooks himself recognizes that portions of the book “make one want to give up on The American Scene as too prissy and prejudiced to be worth our attention as a serious piece of sociology.”

Brooks argues that while in The American Scene James is not opposed to democracy, he views his native country as “a place of irresponsible capitalism.” In his travelogue, if that is what The American Scene is, James comes out against American skyscrapers, elevators, electric trollies; he has mixed views on Pullman train cars, in which he traveled across America to California. He admires California but is severely critical of Californians. (One is reminded that the American diplomat George Kennan claimed in his diaries that it was a real mistake for white men to occupy California.) Brooks notes that “James’s extravagant apostrophe of capitalist greed is not unfounded.”

The real value of Henry James Comes Home is that its author fills in the background of James’s visit—or his “adventure,” as James at one point calls it—to America. Availing himself of the four volumes of James’s letters, of Leon Edel’s six-volume biography of James, and of his fiction where pertinent, he provides many of the details of James’s trip to America that James left out. One of Brooks’s sentences alone is worth the price of the book: “How you treat others is the essential subject of all of James’s fiction.”

Brooks also takes up Henry’s relationship with his older brother William. No more brilliant set of siblings perhaps ever existed, yet William little valued Henry’s fiction, nor did he think much of The American Scene. Not long after Henry arrived for his visit to America, William departed for Greece. Brooks quotes William’s reflection on turning down his nomination to the American Academy of Arts and Letters: “And I am the more encouraged to this course by the fact that my younger and shallower and vainer brother is already in the Academy, and that if I were there too, the other families might think James interest too rank and strong.” Nothing here so simple as Freud’s sibling rivalry, I suspect, but instead the fact that the two brilliant brothers, one a consummate artist, the other a powerful intellectual, were utterly opposed in their views of the world.

In the end Brooks questions the true purpose of The American Scene. What the book is really about, he writes, “is by no means easy to say.” He adds, “The restless analyst isn’t even sure what he is looking for; he is constantly probing appearances and facades and behaviors and manners in order to say what they represent. . . . The reader needs the patience to follow through the metaphorically induced scenarios to the implications of their resolution.” Not an easy task, as any reader soon discovers.

The American Scene, it turns out, is itself incomplete. A second volume, to be called “The Sense of the West,” was planned. But James, upon returning to Lamb House, his home in Rye, set to work supplying prefaces and revising much of his fiction for a New York edition; he also worked on two novels he never finished. James died before he could turn to the second volume of The American Scene. Which reminds one of another category of special books: those books one is pleased never got written.