I just spent a review trying to figure out why I didn't like a book that was very similar to a "classic." It was kind of a relief to go from that to this book, which is undeniably by someone who is literary and wrote classics, and to be able to say that I really enjoyed The Ambassadors quite a lot. I think I enjoyed it more then A Portrait of a Lady, which had some aspects that grated on me. Phew! I'm not an entire Philistine, after all!
It's funny. This book spends quite a lot of time not saying things directly, even though they're fairly obvious, but it's so indirect that you're not even sure what's not obvious. And yet, it works. It feels like this should drive me crazy, that I should want someone to say what they mean, for once, and yet that is the point of the book. It's about a culture, a place, where things are said and not said in different ways, clashing with another culture in which the things not said are slightly different, but so are the ways in which you interpret things that are not done.
Look at me, I'm turning into Henry James. I'm very sorry if the previous paragraph was oblique. I could narrow it down by giving a spoiler that certainly isn't revealed in these terms in the novel: Yes. They're fucking.
Of course, you can say that, but what does it mean? This is really the great delight of The Ambassadors, that it takes a sexual and emotional relationship so seriously and with such tolerance of ambiguity. What does it mean emotionally, if it means anything at all? What does it mean materially? What does it mean physically? What, oh what, does it mean socially? Sex, after all, does not happen in isolation - it's as much a part of the culture as anything else, just one with heavily charged meanings and interpretations. Oh, Henry James, I sort of love you for this book!
So, we have as a main character Strether, a man in his fifties, editor of a minor literary journal in a small town in New England. He is provisionally engaged to a rich widow of that town, but before they get married, she dispatches him to France to find her wastrel son and convince him to come home and take up the family business.
Once he gets there, though, Strether finds that he rather likes Chad as he is now, that whatever he has been up to in France suits him rather more than not, and whereas he was quite a callow jerk before, now he's charming and altogether polished. Strether also enjoys his own time in Paris very much, but a lot of it is trying to figure out what exactly is going on between Chad and a married woman and/or her daughter.
It is here that no one will give a straight answer. Strether has to observe and become part of Chad's circle to discover who Chad might be romantically attached to, and what that means. Strether is more than willing to let that float as ambiguity, and in fact, seems to prefer it that way. If he doesn't know the exact details of what's going on, he can see the effects, and there is no need for moral judgement. He can simply enjoy Chad as he is now, and be delighted to get to know Marie de Vionnet and her daughter.
So, instead of urging Chad to return to the United States, he encourages him to stay longer, until his mother sends over her daughter and daughter's husband to check up on both Chad and Strether. At that point, Strether must face that the ambiguity he relishes will not be tolerated by New England society, or the daughter, or the mother, and he is being found wanting for not passing harsh moral judgement, immediately.
This isn't all in praise of ambiguity, though. The very looseness of what's been going on has also meant that Strether has been able to tell himself some romantic stories which, it turns out, may not be borne out by the evidence. Chad's attachment may not be quite as firm as it first appears, and he might revert to the New England-style more easily than Strether himself.
All in all, this is a fascination book on the role of cultural context, ambiguity, and judgement in differing societies, and I had a lot of fun reading it. I frequently didn't understand any more than Strether, but that meant I got to discover as he did. It's an interesting read decades on, when the issues that would pop to my mind are not those that would come to others.
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