I can't concentrate this hard, at least now. Got about 5% into the book. Ran across a one hundred and sixteen word sentence, just a page or two after another 100 word sentence. It's not that I can't comprehend them, but it's too much work. Maybe someday?

Protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether agrees to travel to Paris to attempt to convince his fiancée’s wayward son, Chad, to return to the US to run the family business. What he finds in Paris is different than expected. Chad is a pleasant young man who has been positively influenced by his associations with a woman and her daughter. Strether meets the two and comes to enjoy their company. A new set of “ambassadors” is sent by his fiancée when Strether fails to obtain the desired action. Over the course of the story, Strether gradually changes his point of view, which in turn, changes what he values in life.

“His greatest uneasiness seemed to peep at him out of the imminent impression that almost any acceptance of Paris might give one’s authority away. It hung before him this morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor difference comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.”

Published in 1903, it was originally written as a serial in the North American Review. I think I may have appreciated it more if I had read it in its original form. As a novel, the primary drawback is that it does not flow very well, and there are many lengthy circuitous sentences. I did not enjoy it quite as much as James’s Portrait of a Lady, which I recommend reading ahead of this one, but overall, I enjoyed it and found it worth my time.
( )

Maybe a little bit too subtle; I sometimes felt I was drowning in obscure idioms, euphemisms, and circumlocution. Still, few authors handle entrapment as brilliantly as Henry James. ( )

4/26/22

I am nearly now at the end of the marathon Henry James readathon that a I began two years ago. Only two books of tales and two novels to go.

The Ambassadors marks the halfway point of James’s final great trilogy of novels, bookended by Wings of a Dove and The Golden Bowl. It tells the tale of Lambert Strether, a middle-aged Bostonian of unclear means (but probably meagre ones) who is despatched to Paris to bring back the son of Mrs. Newsome, his sort-of fiancée - it is never quite clear whether a betrothal has taken place, but then it’s never quite clear with Strether what has taken place. He’s one of James’s great late portraits of middle age - insecure, unhappy, uncertain, finding contentment at part in Paris, its streets and its art but most of all its sensibilities. In this he is like Mrs Newsome’s errant son Chad, who he finds an apparently more likeable and more grounded and rounded person than he remembered, made rich by the example of Paris and more specifically of Madame de Vionnet, an exquisite woman with a grown daughter, whose marital status is uncertain.

And that’s the point of the project for James, I think. Everything in this book is uncertain, contingent, ambiguous. Every single character is unreliable - or at least their motives are murky. It’s actually a triumph of sustained control but it does make it hard to relate, to anyone - at least until towards the end, when Strether decides to return to America and give up all he has gained. I feel the ending is meant to be tragic - but I’m not even sure about that. ( )