Vintage James
James is famous for his complicated sentences, dense and minute psychological descriptions, and extra-long paragraphs, and What Maisie Knew is no exception to this rule. It helps as you're reading and rereading these sentences to ask yourself: what would be lost if James wrote in a simpler, more straightforward way? Why not just come out and say what's happening? Or, when nothing is happening—which is often in this novel—why not just come out and say what a character thinks? Well, because people are complicated, and to make them seem easy would be to miss this fundamental Jamesian point.
Consider this moment during Maisie's last meeting with her father:
[…] for a time, while they sat together, there was an extraordinary mute passage between her vision of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision. (XIX.1)
Crazy, right? We agree. But then, all this really does pass between father and daughter that day. James wants to record that meeting in all its complexity and not leave anything out. And actually, this passage is pretty dang succinct considering it describes four levels of looking: 1) Beale looking at Maisie 2) Maisie seeing Beale look at her 3) Beale seeing Maisie see Beale looking at her and 4) *inhale* Maisie seeing Beale see Maisie see Beale looking at her.
Yup—those are all different looks. And James describes this crazy transaction way more succinctly than we did.