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 two, such as the ghost-liness of the family….

Given such ingredients, the concoction might turn out well or ill; in the event, Mr. Plante produces nothing more edifying than a limp pastiche of Henry James. He starts off badly, referring to "a fine translucent membranous tissue" when he means cellophane. Then he goes from pastiche to pastiche, his relation to James that of mimic to genius. Parts of the book would make an amusing venture as a graduate seminar exercise….

The elegance is self-regarding, parasitic, like style in drag. The prime effect of Mr. Plante's novel is that we recall Henry James's novels, and deplore the fact that at this moment we are not reading them…. Genius apart, what [Mr. Plante's] book fatally lacks is perception, the passion of perception; if James's criteria are invoked, Mr. Plante has only himself to blame.