Rating: 
Summary: At Least It's Better Than "The Wings of the Dove"
Review: There, is that praise faint enough for you? Yes, I found "The Ambassadors" a great deal more readable than James' novel of the year before, but that's not to say I have any great love for this one. Henry James seriously needed to write about something other than European sophistication contrasted with American naivety and crudity (how many times can you tell the same story?), but this novel does tackle that theme about as well as James was ever going to. I have nothing against people who like James' writing; each to his own. But I don't know that I've ever read an author whose style has annoyed me more. People praise James for his pychological complexity and his mastery of subtext. His novels certainly are full of subtext; it's practically overflowing the pages. But a novel that's all subtext is no better than one that wears its agenda on its sleeve. I understand the influence James had on literature. He acted as a kind of bridge between the moral simplicity of the Victorians and the more psychologically ambiguous writing of the Modernists. But as with many literary figureheads, knowing and understanding his influence does not necessarily make him enjoybable to read.
Rating: 
Summary: New England provinciality meets Parisian charm
Review: Was there any American more European than Henry James? "The Ambassadors" begins in England and takes place mostly in Paris, and even though most of its characters are American, it is only referentially concerned with its author's native country. At the same time, the novel is not about Americans frivolously sowing their wild oats in exotic ancestral lands, but rather how they use their new settings to break away from restrictive American traditions and conventions and redefine their values and standards of living. The main character is a late-middle-aged widower named Lambert Strether who edits a local periodical in the town of Woollett, Massachussetts, and is a sort of factotum for a wealthy industrialist's widow named Mrs. Newsome, a woman he may possibly marry. Strether's latest assignment from Mrs. Newsome is to go to Paris to convince her son, Chad, to give up what she assumes is a hedonistic lifestyle and return to Woollett to marry a proper, respectable young lady, his brother-in-law's sister to be specific. There is a greater ulterior motive, too -- the prosperity of the family business relies on Chad's presence. In Paris, Strether finds that Chad has surrounded himself with a more stimulating group of friends, including a mousy aspiring painter named John Little Bilham, and that he is in love with an older, married woman named Madame de Vionnet. Providing companionship and counsel to Strether in Paris are his old friend, a retired businessman named Waymarsh, and a woman he met in England, named Maria Gostrey, who happens to be an old schoolmate of the Madame's. When it appears that Strether is failing in his mission to influence Chad, Mrs. Newsome dispatches her daughter and son-in-law, Jim and Sarah (Newsome) Pocock, and Jim's marriageable sister Mamie, to Paris to apply pressure. Ultimately, Strether, realizing that he's blown his chances with Mrs. Newsome and that Chad has the right idea anyway, finds himself enjoying the carefree life in Paris, which has liberated him from his lonely, stifling existence in Woollett. Not having cared much for James's previous work "The Wings of the Dove," I felt something click with "The Ambassadors." Maybe it's because I found the story a little more absorbing and could empathize with Strether; maybe it's because my reading skills are maturing and I'm learning to appreciate James's dense, oblique prose style. I realize now that, for all the inherent difficulty in his writing, literature took a giant step forward with Henry James; if the Novel is, as he claimed, "the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms," it takes a writer like James to show us how.
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