"Moods,” by Louisa May Alcott

FM's ratings:

1. Premise 4
2. Prose 7
3. Plot 6
4. Characters 6
5. Overall 6

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“Under the above title [Moods], Miss Alcott has given us her version of the old story of the husband, the wife, and the lover. This story has been told so often that an author’s only pretext for telling it again is his consciousness of an ability to make it either more entertaining or more instructive; to invest it with incidents more dramatic, or with a more pointed moral. Its interest has already been carried to the furthest limits, both of tragedy and comedy, by a number of practised French writers: under this head, therefore, competition would be superfluous. Has Miss Alcott proposed to herself to give her story a philosophical bearing? We can hardly suppose it. We have seen it asserted that her book claims to deal with the ‘doctrine of affinities.’ What the doctrine of affinities is, we do not exactly know; but we are inclined to think that our author has been somewhat maligned. Her book is, to our perception, innocent of any doctrine whatsoever.” Thus wrote Henry James, in 1865, and I think he pretty much nails it. It’s ironic to me that when I tried to read one of his novels, I found it so tedious that I didn’t bother to finish it; extremely rare for me. I struggled to finish this one, it became so pedantic and trite near the end. The prose is mostly very good by Victorian Era standards, but took a maudlin, overwritten turn for the worse in the last few chapters. The same is true of the characters, who marginally held my interest for most of the first 80% of the book, but gradually became more stereotypical and wooden. Someday I might read Alcott’s most beloved novel, “Little Women,” having read “Little Men” already. But I’m certainly not in any hurry to do so.