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"I'm so tired of old books about tea," said my friend Lauren recently, and I hope she stays the hell away from snobby constipated Henry James. Here he is with the least engaging first sentence in literature:

"Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."

Many of the other sentences are also about tea. But it's not all tea; while they drink tea they talk! And talk, and talk. James reminds me of your shitty coworker who makes a lot of excuses. He spins words upon words explaining what's going on, what he's thinking, what his plans are, how his personal affairs have affected his performance, and it all sounds very convincing but at a certain point you're like but what have you done?

It's an apt title because it's a portrait. A beautiful one, full of detail and shading - "recessed and deferred complexities," James Woods calls it - but it doesn't move much. Henry James himself was aware, when he wrote its preface, that it "consisted not at all in any conceit of a 'plot'." And he makes this bizarre decision: when plot arrives - when Isabel chooses a husband, and again when she marries him, and at a momentous later decision - he skips ahead. We don't get to be there for the crucial moments of her life. It feels like looking at a mountain range wreathed in clouds; we see them going up, and we see them coming down, but we never get to see the peaks themselves. He writes between the lines, and omits the lines.

This is frustrating, and yet: I feel like this is one of those books that will be closer in the rearview mirror. It has a distinctive voice and feel. James has insight into how people work. In Colm Toibin's fictionalized biography The Master, he quietly suggests that James benefited from his closetization: he carefully pretended to be someone else throughout his life, and he got very good at pretending to be someone else. He certainly does get deep into Archer's head, and several others.

Not that he shows you everything. He shows you some things in great detail; others stay shrouded. In a way it's a psychological novel; in another way it's more like a mystery, where the crime is her life. The experience of being mystified by Isabel is frustrating; with time, though, I suspect the mystery of Isabel will stick in my head.

So, four stars. Three stars for the experience of reading it; five stars, I'm predicting, for having read it. Full of recessed and deferred complexities it is. It might also be one of those books that get better with re-reading. But the question is, how much tea can I stomach?