[.ca] The Ambassadors (ISBN 0809593998)

From Amazon.com:
The Ambassadors, which Henry James considered his best work, is the most exquisite refinement of his favorite theme: the collision of American innocence with European experience. This time, James recounts the continental journey of Louis Lambert Strether--a fiftysomething man of the world who has been dispatched abroad by a rich widow, Mrs. Newsome. His mission: to save her son Chadwick from the clutches of a wicked (i.e., European) woman, and to convince the prodigal to return to Woollett, Massachusetts. Instead, this all-American envoy finds Europe growing on him. Strether also becomes involved in a very Jamesian "relation" with the fascinating Miss Maria Gostrey, a fellow American and informal Sacajawea to her compatriots. Clearly Paris has "improved" Chad beyond recognition, and convincing him to return to the U.S. is going to be a very, very hard sell. Suspense, of course, is hardly James's stock-in-trade. But there is no more meticulous mapper of tone and atmosphere, nuance and implication. His hyper-refined characters are at their best in dialogue, particularly when they're exchanging morsels of gossip. Astute, funny, and relentlessly intelligent, James amply fulfills his own description of the novelist as a person upon whom nothing is lost. --Rhian Ellis

dense yet worthwhile:
Another tough Henry James read still contains his best leading character> In fact, all the characters here are well drawn, even ones you never meet, like Mrs. Newsome, who is strictly an indirect background force. James always wrote very piercing stories of moral and romantic conflict and this one, vague and hard as the langauge can be, is no exception. Despite the narrative's thickness, you can't helped but be awed by how a master can re-arrange the English tongue to sound this beautiful. You will feel every inch of being in Paris here, and, as well, the frustration and confusion of every lost soul in the story. Even the scared conformist characters are vividly drawn. Another amazing effort by a writer who isn't always easy to dissect. Requires more than a brief sit thru. Stick with it, you will feel like you've lived the book yourself.

New England provinciality meets Parisian charm:
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.

Narration via nuanced indirection:
James' novel affected me in part because I also fell in love with Paris, though not with a Parisian. The sinuous, difficult prose provides the perfect vehicle for the adventures of aging Lambert Strether as he goes to Paris to try to recover a New England son who will not return to his domineering mother and take a role in the family business--manufacturing an article that is never named. In Europe he meets a degree of sophistication he had never known but also a jungle of moral ambivalences. If I gave the novel only four stars, it is not because of the difficult prose, which I sometimes cursed, but because the crucial instance of moral turpitude which he describes seems practically banal now. I once bundled up all my Henry James books in a fit of pique and was on the way to taking them to a library book sale, but thought better of it. And it was a better thought.

Lost In A Madness of Words:
The Portrait of A Lady by Henry James is as perfect as a novel can be, and long after reading it, I remain mesmerized by its perfection, which has me wanting to flay The Ambassadors for having the impertinence of being created by the same man. The writing in The Ambassadors---I read every word, slowly---reminds me of the story of the mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., in the movie A Beautiful Mind, in which Mr. Nash is consumed by a madness of numbers. The numbers are all there, in his head, and he adores them, but is too absorbed by them to be able to get them out properly for another person's account. In the movie The Pillow Book, there is a scene where words are superimposed over the body of a woman to suggest that she is washing herself with them, as they are the objects of her devotion, the means to record life, the means of hanging on to moments. In The Ambassadors, Henry James strikes me as being overcome by an infatuation with words to no great account---words composed for love of them without giving lyrical effect, clarity, or shape to a story or characters. Artistry is making something perfect, communicating a personal vision, with all one's tricks, so that others get it clearly, perfectly---not being so personal that the creation hardly reaches anyone but the creator, and, in the case of The Ambassadors's main character, Strether, not being so personal that his fascinations are chiefly fascinating to him. Overly many words in The Ambassadors give reverence and eternity to a moment, a thought, or the delicate ascertainment of motive, but the reverence is not remembered as much as the roughness in going through so many words, obscurely put, to reach understandings that are not great enough or numerous enough to make the effort fulfilling. The novel should have been shortened by at least one-third. Allusions in the novel's narration and dialogue are chronic, creating a deliberate vagueness without building a sufficient quantity of impressions to keep one from finally being exasperated that all one has met is a pile of words in which only James is bathing luxuriantly. Using too many words to tell too little has James repeating, too often, what long ago was implied or expressed. At story's end, little more is known than what one suspected at the beginning. Obviousness in a plot is not fatal, as demonstrated by William Shakespeare, who sets out characters and purposes straight-off in most of his plays and then proceeds through the details with magnificence, large points being told clearly with the fewest words in the prettiest arrangement. In getting to the end of his story, James does not add much of interest, but confounds by having one unsure, too often, what language intended, whether in describing a thing or a person or a motive. Throughout, something that is imputed to one person seems capable of being imputed to any of the characters, which might be alright if it led to discovery eventually. The work in determining something as simple as who or what was meant by the words "he," "she," "this," or "it" was not worthy of the gain. Subtly leading a reader to an impression appeals to me, but finally there has to be impression. Gore Vidal is a master of subtlety and clarity. Everything he tells me subtly seems to be absorbed by me clearly. In The Ambassadors, James has me arguing through language that did not tell me enough to provide delight from comprehension, in contrast to his writing in The Portrait of A Lady, where subtly there is a building of Isabel Archer's personality so that one sees her from above, from below, from the sides, and straight through without quite knowing how one got to know her in the round except through magic. Long, controlled, and clear sentences are to be adored, and so is repetition, which is the key to learning. James's sentences in The Ambassadors are long, controlled, and too often unclear, and rather than gathering to clarity, they annoy as nonsense for requiring so much work from the reader for so little. In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin's masterpiece of clarity, it is clear that Darwin cannot write except by way of long sentences, but his sentences on matters obscure and subtle are commanding, so clear that they make light work out of something difficult in other hands. And throughout, Darwin is repetitive in a delightful way, reinforcing and accumulating knowledge so that you are drawn into his view of the world if only because you want to be drawn by someone who has expressed his view so clearly and perfectly, with dedication. And dedication is what my most favourable impression of The Ambassadors is---the dedication of the main character, Strether, to figuring out motives and making what he regards as the right choices. In this way, Strether reminded me of the determination of Michel de Montaigne and Charles Darwin to working hard to figure out the motives of life, determination that inspires awe, except that Montaigne and Darwin saw themselves through their words clearly and Strether, while making decisions and figuring things out, did so only with words that leave the reader with more sensations of the unclear than the things figured out.

I loved reading this book!:
I had some difficulty at first, getting the rhythm of his writing, but once I got it, I thoroughly enjoyed it. This is a novel about an American from Woollett, Massachusetts, named Lambert Strether, who sets out for Europe for the purpose of fetching his fiancée's, Mrs. Newsome's, son Chadwick Newsome, from the supposed clutches of an inappropriate liaison with a French woman, Madame Marie de Vionnet, and her daughter, Mademoiselle Jeanne de Vionnet. Other characters include Mr. Strether's longtime friend, Mr. Waymarsh, a new acquaintance, Maria Gostrey, Mrs. Newsome's daughter, Mrs. Sarah Pocock, her husband James Pocock, and Chad's intended bride-to-be, Miss Mamie Pocock. The Ambassadors of the title of the novel seem to be the group of Sarah, Jim and Mamie, who come to Europe later with the purpose of fetching Mr. Strether back for Mrs. Newsome. What occurs is a trial of manners and propriety with Mr. Strether encouraging Chad to stay on in Paris, France, with the advice of living life to the fullest rather than going back to America to a life of boredom and a stale marriage. I enjoyed reading the book itself, and I would greatly recommend this to others!