The American by Henry James
Published 1877 · 125,400 words · about 8 hours at an average pace
How hard is The American to read?
The American scores 51 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Comfortable mid-career James, far plainer than the late work.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Long but navigable sentences.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Concrete social manoeuvre with a moral argument underneath.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Considerable Parisian detail.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- A third person tied to a man who misreads everyone around him.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The house and the convent carry the theme.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Sustained irony about American innocence.
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- The renunciation is deliberately unsatisfying.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Linear.
How The American is regarded
The American holds a literary regard score of 75 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.