Ashley C. Barnes's Love and Depth in the American Novel from Stowe to James is an innovative and engaging study examining religious and antisocial intersections and tensions found in nineteenth-century American fiction. While blurring the lines etched between antebellum and post-antebellum literary styles, Barnes examines writers as diverse as Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Elizabeth Stoddard. Before moving into her five-chapter study, which includes a final in-depth analysis of the history and ethics of contemporary readings of American literature, Barnes offers an introduction that examines the normative role that religion played in nineteenth-century American literature. Through an “alternative model of interpretative intimacy” (3), Barnes skillfully interrogates the oft-discussed Protestant impulses of the mid-nineteenth century while dexterously probing the Catholicization of narratological rhetoric.The first two chapters of the book—“Love and Depth Canonized” and “Sentimental Communion,” respectively—establish how anti-Catholic sentiments, Catholic worship, liberal Protestantism, and resistance to Protestant norms helped to shape nineteenth-century American literary standards. Chapter 1 offers a superb historical review of the ways in which historicist criticism threatened Christian faith, as well as how Catholicism countered the cultural dominance of Protestantism. Through her reading of Phelps's The Gates Ajar and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Barnes demonstrates the method by which these two “Catholic-friendly” (31) Protestant writers employ a paradigm of intimacy to link together the excesses of theological and aesthetic complaint.In chapter 3, “Romantic Spectatorship,” Barnes contends that Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and Melville's Pierre effectively drape Protestant contempt for true intimacy around the romantic love story and the complexities of the language of love and thus provide a stark warning against “insisting on revelation” (89). Barnes begins her chapter with a discussion of Melville's 1850 review of Hawthorne's Mosses from the Old Manse, but Barnes's primary focus is on Melville's intimate portrayal of Hawthorne, not as the amusing and inoffensive writer that many readers at the time understood him to be, but as a “more dangerous author” who is “visible only to a gifted reader” (88). Melville clearly saw himself as just such a reader. As Barnes points out, Hawthorne's writing engenders an altered consciousness in Melville, which, in turn, “consummates an intimacy that empowers both the reader and the author” (89). It is just this type of intimacy, Barnes maintains, that yields the profit of a “potent hidden depth” (89), a love story between author and reader that effectively merges Hawthorne and Melville together and presents a model of how the “romantic mode imagines revelatory intimacy” (89). This, Barnes argues, is a necessary contrast to the sentimental novel's “love story of communion” (89).In their respective novels, Hawthorne and Melville, the “twin stars of American romanticism” (89), realize the main characters’ potential for communion, yet this potential is sheltered under the gloomy tent of Protestant white male privilege, which is, as Barnes points out, a distinct shift away from the vibrant passions of Catholicism that turn believers into “swooning women” (92). While sentimentalism often serves as a “model for … readers’ interpretive and emotional practice” (71) by emphasizing “group subjectivities,” the “structure of communion,” and a public intimacy that is “mediated by material props” (61), the sentimental tone presented in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance and Melville's Pierre is “occasionally ridiculous” and highlights a tacky self-awareness “verging on campy” (90). Barnes argues throughout this chapter that these tendencies create a “structure of mutual spectatorship” that is available to both the author and the reader, who subsequently develop the potential for communion through a “parallel looking-at that maintains real intimacy because it does not stop with a final revelation” (122) but allows the reader to experience a sense of familiarity with the author.A fourth chapter explores the problem of a “persistent binary between romance and realism” and how consumer excess complicates the possibility for true intimacy. This cultural shift toward materiality receives particular attention in Barnes's carefully focused and fertile comparisons between Stoddard's The Morgesons and James's The Golden Bowl. In each novel, objectification appears to be the only way one can love. Artifacts are indicative of a Victorian consumer culture that fosters “self-other relationships” (160), yet, as James proposes, true intimacy can thrive, as “self and other appreciate each other's displays” (161), signifying that consumerism has not deprived love of its allure.The final chapter is a comprehensive review of American literary scholarship from the final decades of the twentieth century to the present. Citing such scholars and ethicists as Eve Sedgwick, Jane Tompkins, Martha Nussbaum, Rita Felski, J. Hillis Miller, and Dorothy J. Hale, Barnes concludes that the insights produced through “the intimacy of communion” are conditional, as both critic and text participate in an iterative interpretation that never reaches a “fully disclosed meaning” (190).Each chapter of this fascinating study is rich and varied. While Barnes relies on a sophisticated theoretical approach, she also writes with precision and clarity and provides theoretical context for each of her arguments. Consequently, the book is suitable for advanced undergraduate students and above.