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A review by lee_foust
The American by Henry James
4.0
In my project of reading all of Henry James's novels in chronological order, here's installment four.
James's second officially avowed novel, The American is certainly a lot longer, and you'd assume more important for its bulk, than those leading up to it and its immediate predecessor, Roderick Hudson. In an overall critical way I feel about the same about this novel as I did about Hudson, James' first avowed attempt at the great American novel: it's a mighty solid read, but also a tad flawed around the edges. Here that flaw is an unwelcome close brush with melodrama in act two, which threw me; but the ship is righted and act three certainly finds James in the very subtle and adult league of George Eliot, my standard for the best of Victorian fiction. James does add something to the modern novel here, though: a fresh take on resignation and healing that edges him ever closer to modernism, even as he remains mired in some of the trappings of nineteenth-century realism, the obnoxious omniscient narrator and long passages of pure exposition. (Side note, speaking of Eliot, I think I find James flawed when he veers towards the cutesy Dickensian style, the silly character/caricature or the melodramatic plot twist.
When this novel presents scenes and dialogue it's at its best--the opening I must say grabbed me right away--and really shows why we still read James today. Occasionally during the expositional passages it felt more like a slog, still the novel went pretty fast for being nearly 500 pages. I breezed through it.
In terms of meaning, I was surprised by the outlines of the plot. Since James's more famous novels focus on the young female American heiress and her romance with a charming but duplicitous European suitor (which is supposed to dramatically depict the naive vivacity of the USA versus the scheming cynicism of a fading old world) I actually found this plot a tad more convincing as a metaphor for US-European relations. Even if the novel makes the mistake (which I will second in a moment in the next paragraph) of confusing social class with race--probably the most common mistake humans make besides assuming that accident and thunderstorms prove there is a god or that the stars actually influence our destinies and actions.)
Here we have the very brash but awfully good-natured American businessman courting a French grand dame and it's her family that takes the role of corrupt threat of impediment (not to spoil act three), cynicism, and downright evil in the form of a family skeleton. Oh, it stays well within the bounds of realism and verisimilar characters and events--if perhaps a tad melodramatic, as I said above for a moment when the plot comes to a head--but the deep truth of a certain honest American approach to coupling and most social affairs (such as business, marriage, and public reputation), which is not at all present in the European way of doing and thinking about such things, is well taken. This American thirty year resident in Italy felt it deeply. (The fact that many of these formally noble social tropes have sunk down to the European working class clearly signals a certain stage of capitalism and the triumph of bourgeois television to diffuse its ideas of comportment.)
The subplot of "our hero," as the novel annoyingly calls him several times, Christopher Newman, (note the Dickensian surname--oh, brother) and his friendship with his beloved's slightly wayward brother, says it more clearly. Europeans often live and die by certain overblown mannerist concepts of deportment such as honor, duty, reputation, etc., which we Americans can only shake out heads at. So much fuss for chimeras it seems to us. As if life we're hard enough already with all of this silly made up formality to go through. (Although I admit it's awfully amusing, sometimes, to watch, if one isn't directly involved or a victim of such nonsense.)
Like many solid realistic novels of its century as well as some modernist masterpieces, the whole thing boils down to Heraclitus again and character manifesting its own destiny in the form of plot and conflict resolution. I liked that very much.
Technically next up would be The Europeans in which James reverses the terms and describes another European brother and sister duo coming the the USA to make their fortune and see if love and marriage to a foreigner is possible. I'm going to skip it as I read it just two years ago. It's a rather more lighthearted affair--and its lack of gravitas is also signaled by it's much shorter length. Instead I will read the tale that James wrote about this same time and which made him famous "Daisy Miller." It's practically novel length anyway.
James's second officially avowed novel, The American is certainly a lot longer, and you'd assume more important for its bulk, than those leading up to it and its immediate predecessor, Roderick Hudson. In an overall critical way I feel about the same about this novel as I did about Hudson, James' first avowed attempt at the great American novel: it's a mighty solid read, but also a tad flawed around the edges. Here that flaw is an unwelcome close brush with melodrama in act two, which threw me; but the ship is righted and act three certainly finds James in the very subtle and adult league of George Eliot, my standard for the best of Victorian fiction. James does add something to the modern novel here, though: a fresh take on resignation and healing that edges him ever closer to modernism, even as he remains mired in some of the trappings of nineteenth-century realism, the obnoxious omniscient narrator and long passages of pure exposition. (Side note, speaking of Eliot, I think I find James flawed when he veers towards the cutesy Dickensian style, the silly character/caricature or the melodramatic plot twist.
When this novel presents scenes and dialogue it's at its best--the opening I must say grabbed me right away--and really shows why we still read James today. Occasionally during the expositional passages it felt more like a slog, still the novel went pretty fast for being nearly 500 pages. I breezed through it.
In terms of meaning, I was surprised by the outlines of the plot. Since James's more famous novels focus on the young female American heiress and her romance with a charming but duplicitous European suitor (which is supposed to dramatically depict the naive vivacity of the USA versus the scheming cynicism of a fading old world) I actually found this plot a tad more convincing as a metaphor for US-European relations. Even if the novel makes the mistake (which I will second in a moment in the next paragraph) of confusing social class with race--probably the most common mistake humans make besides assuming that accident and thunderstorms prove there is a god or that the stars actually influence our destinies and actions.)
Here we have the very brash but awfully good-natured American businessman courting a French grand dame and it's her family that takes the role of corrupt threat of impediment (not to spoil act three), cynicism, and downright evil in the form of a family skeleton. Oh, it stays well within the bounds of realism and verisimilar characters and events--if perhaps a tad melodramatic, as I said above for a moment when the plot comes to a head--but the deep truth of a certain honest American approach to coupling and most social affairs (such as business, marriage, and public reputation), which is not at all present in the European way of doing and thinking about such things, is well taken. This American thirty year resident in Italy felt it deeply. (The fact that many of these formally noble social tropes have sunk down to the European working class clearly signals a certain stage of capitalism and the triumph of bourgeois television to diffuse its ideas of comportment.)
The subplot of "our hero," as the novel annoyingly calls him several times, Christopher Newman, (note the Dickensian surname--oh, brother) and his friendship with his beloved's slightly wayward brother, says it more clearly. Europeans often live and die by certain overblown mannerist concepts of deportment such as honor, duty, reputation, etc., which we Americans can only shake out heads at. So much fuss for chimeras it seems to us. As if life we're hard enough already with all of this silly made up formality to go through. (Although I admit it's awfully amusing, sometimes, to watch, if one isn't directly involved or a victim of such nonsense.)
Like many solid realistic novels of its century as well as some modernist masterpieces, the whole thing boils down to Heraclitus again and character manifesting its own destiny in the form of plot and conflict resolution. I liked that very much.
Technically next up would be The Europeans in which James reverses the terms and describes another European brother and sister duo coming the the USA to make their fortune and see if love and marriage to a foreigner is possible. I'm going to skip it as I read it just two years ago. It's a rather more lighthearted affair--and its lack of gravitas is also signaled by it's much shorter length. Instead I will read the tale that James wrote about this same time and which made him famous "Daisy Miller." It's practically novel length anyway.