An interesting novel worth reader attention

Part of the pleasure Dinatia Smith’s novel The Prince offers is comparing her work with Henry James’s The Golden Bowl to see where it resembles the original and where Smith has diverged. I suspect James lovers will malign the book because follows the original so closely.

According to her agent, Smith is the author of four earlier novels, The Hard Rain, Remember This, The Illusionist, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and most recently, The Honeymoon. “Her stories have appeared in numerous publications, including The Hudson Review. She has won a number of awards for her writing, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Until recently, Smith was a cultural correspondent for the New York Times, specializing in literature and the arts.  She has taught at Columbia University and New York University.”

In The Prince, Smith has changed the names, moved the action from London to New York and a private island off the coast of Long Island, and changed the date from 1904 to the (pre-Covid) present. Otherwise, the story is the same.

Obscenely rich Emily Woodford has fallen in love with virtually penniless Prince Federico Pallavicino. A year before meeting Emily, Federico had enjoyed intimate relations with virtually penniless Christina who broke with him because he would not marry her. Coincidentally, Christina is an old, close childhood friend of Emily.

Federico and Emily marry and have a child. Emily, who has been close—perhaps too close—to Henry her 61-year-old, widowed father, encourages him to marry Christina, who like Emily is in her late twenties. Henry does marry Christina and you just know there’s trouble ahead.

Alone together in Henry’s mansion on the East Side, cannot resist one another. Besotted to the degree they will have sex against a Central Park tree, they resume their affair midway through the book. They are able to maintain their secret for a time, but events conspire against them.

Prince Federico is not malicious. He finds his title almost an embarrassment. He has no realistic career ambitions; he and friends formed an unsuccessful rock band in Italy. He was happiest coaching a soccer team of Roman street urchins—and seeing him do so was a reason Emily was attracted to him.

His father-in-law found him a position in a New York bank where his title was used to impress potential clients. “In the intervals between meetings, he sat in his office staring at the rooftops, or tried to teach himself about the stock market, but he’d never know enough to be of real use to Ricardo [his immediate boss]. He watched Italian soccer on his computer, quickly switching to another screen when the secretary came in. Sometimes, he’d fall asleep, then force himself awake and there would be a bitter taste in his mouth.”

Emily has been sheltered, although Smith writes, “Anyone would have been charmed by Emily’s natural beauty, her radiance, her bright, eager manner. Everything about the young woman belied her wealth. She seemed entirely unaware of her beauty and there wasn’t a hint of snobbery in her.” Federico meets her and her father at a Rome dinner party. The next night, he invites her to dinner. The third night he takes her back to his place and they make love. I don’t think that’s the way it happens in Henry James.

Christina has a hippy mother and no money. She is trying to finish her degree, working in a vintage clothing store. “Christina observed her mother coolly, pragmatically, and didn’t complain about her except to remark ruefully on her latest escapades. Christina had an utter lack of self-pity, a cool self-confidence . . . She never complained, and went about her day with energy and forcefulness.”

In some ways, Henry is the most admirable and interesting character in the novel. The family’s money is old money, so old and so immense Henry does not have to demonstrate how rich he is. He trained as a lawyer and spent his years working pro bono for worthy clients who could not have afforded him. The first chapter in The Prince is a scene in which Federico is signing a generous pre-nuptial agreement, one Henry had offered, one that will leave the prince a very rich man should the marriage fail. 

The family money came out of the coal mines, railroads, and blast furnaces that built a West Virginia town that now, with the steel industry gone to Asia and the coal played out, is polluted and decaying. Henry plans to revive the town with an art museum built around his personal collection.

All the family’s wealth, of course, will not protect them from their histories and their characters. And while Henry James may persuade readers of the situation’s plausibility (Colm Tóibin called The Golden Bowl James’s best work), it’s much more difficult for Smith. I do not see what Emily sees in Federico; he seems shallow and aimless.

 I’m not convinced, given what we know about Henry, that he would marry a girl forty years his junior. I know it happens, but not between Henry and Christina. 

Finally, that Federico and Christina would risk the economic wrath of the family and Federico risk losing contact with the daughter he adores by resuming sexual relations seems to this prudent reader virtually unhinged. But that may be the point.

Nevertheless, The Prince an interesting novel and well worth reader attention. If nothing else, it may send readers to the original, the way a movie adaptation will send views to the book. Not a bad result.