Review by monkeelino - The Ambassadors

A review by monkeelino
The Ambassadors by Henry James

4.0

“It will have been sufficiently seen that he was not a man to neglect any good chance for reflexion.”

To say this might be somewhat of an understatement, in the manner of stating such introductions, would be to present Lewis Lambert Strether, our main character in search of the ideal, within the distinct lattice of James’s prose stylings which are replete with enough prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses to sublimate the already sublimated emotional and psychological complexities of his narrative. Jamesian sentences, like the one I just attempted, sometimes require a reverse tracing by the eyes just to re-identify the subject or verb. And yet, there is a strange kind of delight in parsing his style. It carries a kind of modernist formality that matches the tight class circles and intricate psyches his characters inhabit.

Strether has been sent to France by his fiancée to retrieve her adult son, whom everyone believes to be disgracing himself with an untoward woman. Chad, the son, is to return to the U.S., be married in advantageous fashion, and take his rightful place in the family business. What follows is a novel of unsettled expectations, as the charms of France and European culture work against Strether’s mission and shifting alliances obscure just whom to trust.

Regularly required to report back on his progress by post, much of his writing, as well as replies from back home are never shared directly with the reader. What we get is a man perpetually reflecting on his reflections.

“He had added that he was writing, but he was of course always writing; it was a practice that continued, oddly enough, to relieve him, to make him come nearer than anything else to the consciousness of doing something: so that he often wondered if he hadn't really, under his recent stress, acquired some hollow trick, one of the specious arts of make-believe. Wouldn't the pages he still so freely dispatched by the American post have been worthy of a showy journalist, some master of the great new science of beating the sense out of words? Wasn't he writing against time, and mainly to show he was kind?—since it had become quite his habit not to like to read himself over. On those lines he could still be liberal, yet it was at best a sort of whistling in the dark. It was unmistakeable moreover that the sense of being in the dark now pressed on him more sharply—creating thereby the need for a louder and livelier whistle. He whistled long and hard after sending his message… ”

Intermixed with his reflections are a host of comical and commiserating characters. Miss Gostrey, with whom he strikes up quite a memorable friendship from the start, proves to be a pure delight, and the one character in the novel who forces direct questions upon Strether, rarely lets him off the hook. The denser prose sections are offset by rather fun and engaging exchanges of dialogue. Gostrey often provides droll and keen insights, such as commenting after Strether sings another man’s praises:

“Any man's nice when he's in love.”

This is not so much a novel of action and occurrences as it is one of tensions and impressions. Strether views Paris through a romanticized lens, seeing himself cast in a type of drama, too often still feeling like a passive roleplayer, but one who has inevitably ended up on the other side of the stage from whence he entered:

“He was like one of the figures of the old clock at Berne. THEY came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course in the public eye, and went in on the other side. He too had jigged his little course—him too a modest retreat awaited.”

A review by monkeelino The Ambassadors by Henry James

A review by monkeelino
The Ambassadors by Henry James