The Education of Henry Adams is an extraordinary book, maddening, alternately fascinating and tedious, just as often mordantly and unexpectedly funny, one that seems both ragingly pertinent to and impossibly distant from our own time. Written in a stream of perfectly balanced and musical prose, it is at times opaque; coming from a perspective of unimaginable privilege and prestige, it is dominated by themes of failure, exclusion, otherness, superannuation. Most of all, it provokes turbulent half-formed thoughts on history, politics, identity, privilege, and the meaning of the act of reading.
Adams’s book works against its readers’ expectations in a curious way. The book is saturated, from its title down, with a sense of ironic detachment and self-deprecation. The running joke of the book, of sorts, is that Adams continually fails at everything he turns his hand to: he speaks repeatedly of not being able to understand, of being left out of the conversation, of being excluded, of failing, of not being equal to the task at hand. The title is deeply ironic: the book could just as easily be called (pace Lauryn Hill) The Miseducation of Henry Adams, as his attempts to be prepared for the world at large are constantly failing him and leaving him bereft of purpose and capability. There is something amusingly hangdog about his affect—he’s like a 19th-century Kylo Ren, living with petulant ineffectuality in the long shadows of his forbears.