Sketchbook's review of The Ambassadors (original) (raw)

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The Ambassadors by Henry James

The Ambassadors
by

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An eternal situation. When I lived in Paris the worried mum of an American girl arrived to get her back to the US. Her daughter, a close friend then, had developed, in one year, a style and manner -- a chic, if you will, far beyond her suburban Baltimore roots. She soon had a romcom with a visiting, married US pol that resulted in a Paris abortion, which we treated w hilarity, and, after a 3d year, returned to America and married. She now lives in the midwest. Is that Jamesian or not?

It's not, really, because my friend truly lived without giving up anything. With James there must be melancholy...and a certain suffering. When writing his last celebrated 3 novels (this, plus "Wings" & "Bowl"), James, in his late 50s, finally admitted his pash for sculptor Hendrik Andersen ("I hold you long") and a certain warmth crept into the writing of this fine and lonely writer. The theme here is Live, all you can (later spoofed in "Auntie Mame") -- but what you remember is how Paris opened many to beauty and transformed them. It still happens.

The writing in this 400+ pager is flabby, as I see on a reread. Cut, pls, 200 pages. James (dictating) gets carried away by his own droning meanderings. Maybe he was slobbering over Andersen. Too many scholars elevate these 3 novels, forgetting the perfection of his short stories and novellas. Or the chilly wit in "The Awkward Age." (The dialogue in "The Ambassadors" is, at times, downright awful). So I am skipping any rating.

It's time for fresh, young scholars to study James. Happily, we have the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who published her piercing Jamesian ruminations in 1990 ("Epistemology of the Closet"). The finale to "The Ambassadors" betrays the conflicts within James, though it's marvelously spare. His hero, Lambert Strether, who has learned how to live, says farewell to his loyal, loving confidante Maria Gostrey -- because of integrity, says James; Strether failed in his mission abroad. This is poppycock. He says farewell because he simply isn't interested in her that way.

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Reading Progress

January 26, 2012 – Shelved

May 27, 2015 –Started Reading

May 28, 2015 –Finished Reading

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