The Ambassadors in Classics and the Western Canon

Jun 10, 2020 RC rated it really liked it

I found this much more engaging and absorbing than my last encounter with James, reading The Wings of the Dove a few years ago. Compared to that more meandering and foggy book, in which I found my interest flagging at times, the events in this book were way more gripping. I cared about what was going to happen.

Perhaps part of my increased interest in the story here had to do with the subject: Strether's extended summer-holiday midlife crisis in Paris, his growing sense that he’s let his you I found this much more engaging and absorbing than my last encounter with James, reading The Wings of the Dove a few years ago. Compared to that more meandering and foggy book, in which I found my interest flagging at times, the events in this book were way more gripping. I cared about what was going to happen.

Perhaps part of my increased interest in the story here had to do with the subject: Strether's extended summer-holiday midlife crisis in Paris, his growing sense that he’s let his youth and his life pass him by. As I enter midlife myself, I certainly could relate.

I also appreciated the emphasis on the unnamed but all-important source of wealth, for Chad, for Mrs. Newsome, and, ultimately, for Strether himself: A small, probably embarrassingly quotidian household item, manufactured in Woollett, Massachusetts. That humble item, and the immense wealth it produces, sit at the gravitational center of the book, silently exercising an immense force on the events and characters in the book, sucking them all--esp. Chad, Strether--into its vortex, bending their experiences and priorities like light and space are sometimes bent at event horizons. Considered in the light of the effect that item and the wealth it produces have on the characters in the book, the refusal of the characters or the narrator to name it takes on a kind of taboo quality: It's too holy and powerful to be named.

It's true that, at times, the reader's patience can wear thin as James takes forever to just set out something relatively simple. (H.G. Wells once described James's baroque style of taking forever to say the simplest things as akin to a "magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea.") There are times when this method is effective, especially in the conversations with hinted-at suggestions, pregnant silences, meaningful trailings-off, etc. between, say, Strether and Ms. Gostrey; but other times, with lesser characters, and less-significant interactions, the effect of the languid pleonasm can be exhausting.

But there’s definitely something to be said about getting lost in James’s style, in the pillows and clouds of circumlocution. A queer quiet settles over the reader as he gets lost in the vague, diaphanous clouds of prose, where there are no sharp edges, and few pithy aphorisms.

That said, for James, especially in his late period, this was action-packed, even mildly shocking at times. ...more

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