What Was “The Good Wife” Really About?

“What do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” Henry James asked, in a 1921 essay about very long novels. A vast book like “War and Peace,” he wrote, was indisputably full of life; the problem was coherence. A writer could paint on “too ample a canvas” and find “pictorial fusion” elusive. The resulting story could be exciting and resonant, and yet of “no more use for expressing a main intention than a wheel without a hub is of use for moving a cart.”