The Ambassadors (Penguin Classics)
by Henry James
The Failure To Enjoy
The Ambassadors, which Henry James considered his best work, is the
most exquisite refinement of his favorite theme: the collision of American
innocence with European experience. This time, James recounts the
continental journey of Louis Lambert Strether--a fiftysomething man of the
world who has been dispatched abroad by a rich widow, Mrs. Newsome.
His mission: to save her son Chadwick from the clutches of a wicked (i.e.,
European) woman, and to convince the prodigal to return to Woollett,
Massachusetts. Instead, this all-American envoy finds Europe growing on
him. Strether also becomes involved in a very Jamesian relation with the
fascinating Miss Maria Gostrey, a fellow American and informal Sacajawea
to her compatriots. Clearly Paris has improved Chad beyond recognition,
and convincing him to return to the U.S. is going to be a very, very hard
sell. Suspense, of course, is hardly Jamess stock-in-trade. But there is no
more meticulous mapper of tone and atmosphere, nuance and implication.
His hyper-refined characters are at their best in dialogue, particularly
when theyre exchanging morsels of gossip. Astute, funny, and relentlessly
intelligent, James amply fulfills his own description of the novelist as a
person upon whom nothing is lost. --Rhian Ellis
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A wealthy US family sends its `ambassadors' to Paris in order to convince
an heir to abandon the `life of a pagan' and return home to run the family
business.
The theme of Henry James's impeccably written and extremely polished
prose is what Nietzsche called the `right or the wrong conjugation': to live
or to be lived. `One lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of
freedom; therefore don't be like me, without the memory of that illusion.
Don't at any rate miss things out of stupidity. Live!'
For Henry James, people lived in `the corruption of Europe' with its
`femmes du monde'; people were lived in the US. It is the Catholic (live like
God in France) against the Protestant ethic (`I seem to have a life only for
other people').
We are far away here from the Calvinist lesson of `Daisy Miller' who died
because she didn't respect the supreme respectability of her class.
The novel advances extremely slowly, is full of suggesti ons, hints,
(mis)understandings and fluctuating feelings. Direct confrontations are
subdued to the extreme, and end with a laugh.
The novel has another typical characteristic of James's stories: it's all
about `thoroughbred' people, sublime members of the high society. They
are presented in a superlative style: prodigious, exquisite, graceful,
supreme, transcendent, precious, admirable, beautiful, bright, lovely,
magnificent, splendid, brilliant, wonderful ...
With its essential message, this novel is a classic masterpiece.
Not to be missed.
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