Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Sulfroblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Colum Tobin, who is the author most recently of

The Master.

The Master recently received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for

fiction. It is the fifth and most recent of five novels, beginning with the South, the Heather

Blazing, the story of the night, the Blackwater Lightship. The master is a novel about Henry James,

and it's rather extraordinary in the sense that,

and here will be my first question,

Henry James's niece, Pegg, reads his The Portrait of a Lady in the last chapter and wonders

why Isabel Archer goes back to her odious husband.

And James tells her that it's possible, perhaps, if one is lucky, to take two leaps into the dark.

But to leap all the time would be a mistake.

And at any rate for Isabel Archer from Albany, her two have been taken.

Now, this book is an exploration, a sense of Henry James' leaps or the absence thereof into the dark.

And I wonder if you could talk about Henry James' own risks that become the center consideration of the master?

Yes, I think that James' initial move to Europe first to Italy and then Paris and then

moving to London was a sort of leap that he didn't ever do again, that he solidified somehow at the end

...