BOOKS: HENRY ADAMS, RE-EDUCATED

A FICTIONAL CONCEIT INVOLVES THE GREAT WRITER IN A MURDER

Intellectualization, the capacity to turn any belly noise or bird's chirp into sane, ordered paragraphs, flowed like a pretty stream through the meadow of Henry Adams' life. So it may still seem to disenchanted literature students who find their way to graduation blocked by The Education of Henry Adams and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. The problem is not that Adams prattled but that reasonable, melancholy conclusions about 19th century civilization issued forth at an unvarying gush.

The notion of placing such a figure at the center of a murder story in the Paris of 1892 must have seemed both absurd and superb...

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