Nothing Doing? Doing Nothing?

[Juvenal]

The quotation accompanying is from a long article on a book about doing nothing: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/reality-and-its-alternatives/articles/do-something

When it comes to doing nothing, style is everything. Substance, by definition, is absent. With two exceptions—Montaigne and Whitman—the most vivid chroniclers of vacant time are authors whose prose styles are tortured and anxious, effortful in a way that doing nothing never is. Consider Henry James, listless and constipated, charting the languid meditations of characters seated in drawing rooms. In every omission or aborted utterance gleams some sign of inscrutable personality; emptiness of content meets laboriousness of expression.

It was the first paragraph of the review and the author clearly feels about the Master the way I do: unreadable for the most part, at least the "later James."  And yet there are those who adore such as The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl.  Shorter works, earlier works--readable when the right mood comes upon you.  Someday I'll finish The Portrait of a Lady, but I'm busy right now with The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I agree with SPADFY, and tastes vary.  It always surprised me that James Thurber was a "Master" acolyte.  So I'll just ask here if there are devotees of James (Henry, of course!) among the Fora.  I mean the "late James."  No need to justify a liking and burn incense at the altar [recall what H. G. Wells said involving a Jamesian altar]; also no need to lecture the benighted and indifferent.

[Hegemony]

Unfortunately not me.  I tend to find an overlap between devotees of James and those who like Virginia Woolf.  Anyone want to prove or disapprove my assertion?

[Anselm]

Never read James but I believe that Ben Franklin used the term "diddling" for doing nothing.