It is not clear what the ghost of Henry James is doing in The Ghost of Henry James…. Mr. Plante calls James to cast a spell upon the proceedings, but I think he has not been prudent. Presumably the point is to write the kind of story that James might write if he had the luck to live in 1970, free of social restraint. He might write of a family, four brothers and one sister, Julian, Charlotte, Charles, Claud, and Henry. He would dispose of the common problem, money, and urge his presences to live, playing Strether to their Bilham. Perhaps he would devise tortuous relationships; Henry and Baretti, Claud and Frances, Charlotte and Louis, Charles and Colin, the names do not matter. Add a bit of travel, London, a mansion in Italy. Make the sex diversely heterosexual, homosexual, and on one occasion incestuous. Put in a theme or...