Volume 51, Number 4 · March 11, 2004
On 'The Ivory Tower'
By Alan Hollinghurst
When he died in February 1916 Henry James left two unfinished novels—both, as it happens, about bequests. In The Sense of the Past a young American inherits an old London townhouse in which he finds himself taken back to the 1820s; it was a promising ghost-story donnée, and James worked at it on and off between 1900 and the time of his final illness, but without making anything very satisfactory out of it. In The Ivory Tower it is money that is left, by two old American business rivals: $20 million by Abel Gaw to his daughter Rosanna; a smaller but still enormous sum by Frank Betterman to his unworldly nephew, the book's protagonist, Graham Fielder.
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