The Ambassadors (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

~ (Author), Harry Levin (Contributor) "Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was a about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till..." (more)
Key Phrases: sacred rage, Miss Gostrey, Madame de Vionnet, Miss Barrace (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

Review

aHe is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.a
aGraham Greene --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (March 3, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140432337
• ISBN-13: 978-0140432336
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 4.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #682,883 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tough As It Gets, But Worth the Monumental Effort, January 5, 2000

By	oh_pete (Cambridge. MA USA) - See all my reviews

THE AMBASSADORS demands more effort and concentration from the reader than probably any other novel written by an American. But the payoff is worth the effort, however we may begrudge James' frustratingly and intentionally thick prose. James does indeed describe intense human situations in great depth and detail: duty, honor, nostalgia; the contrast between the starchy-collared stiffness of Brahmin Boston (read: America) contrasted with the joie de vivre of Paris (read: Europe); how difficult certain of life's choices can be. These are just a few themes that make this book worthwhile. James' America is young and trying to assert itself (and so takes itself too seriously); his Europe is old and satisfied (and perhaps doesn't take itself seriously enough).

Lambert Strether, a fiftysomething turn-of-the-20th-century bourgeois Bostonian gentleman on an aristocratic lady's errand--she will not marry him until he convinces her son Chad to return to Massachusetts. We see his struggle with his uncomfortable position when he realizes Chad is no longer a spoiled young prep-schooler, but a young gentleman of increasing refinement and self-awareness. And if Strether is anything, by the way, he is one of the most supremely self-aware characters in literary history. Once that Paris air starts to play its magic with Strether himself, we are off to the races. Keeping in mind, of course, that with James' prose we are racing with tortoises. James invites us to ponder how many chances a person truly gets in this life to reinvent his or her self? And if we get the chance, do we always take it? How much should we weigh the consequences before we decide? How much are we willing to accept them after we have chosen?

For similar themes with clearer, faster-paced, and wittier prose, try Edith Wharton's marvelous homage to James, THE AGE OF INNOCENCE.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Aesthetic Triumph, December 6, 2000

By	Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Ambassadors (Library Binding)

This is a novel about a man named Strether, who is as obviously an alter ego of Henry James as Ralph Touchett is of Mr. James in Portrait of A Lady or, to jump continents and switch authors, the main character in Remembrance of Things Past is of Proust. Strether is in Paris to retrieve his (hopefully?) future son-in-law Chad from the wiles of the City of Light and return him to New England so that Strether can marry, settle down and pass his waning years in Puritan New England (New England was still Puritan at the time.). At least, that's the plan. But once Strether arrives, something happens to him, and that mysterious something is what makes this work great. One could easily sum it up and say that Strether becomes enraptured by beauty, and one would be quite right. But to do so would be to miss the point....What is beauty? This is the question the novel essentially asks, all plotting and sub-plotting (and plenty of it) aside. Strether's paralysis because of his inability to grasp what is holding him there and why he becomes one of the greatest procrastinators in English literature (not excepting a certain Danish prince) is the great theme around which all else revolves. Strether is essentially a sensitive, cultured man with hyper-refined sensibilities. Alighting in Paris from the drab New England factory town awakens things in him that can only be perceived through the mind's eye of such a man. He is a sort of Geiger counter which registers things missed by others not so equipped (i.e., the rest of the characters.) "Strether had not for years so rich a consciousness of time-a bag of gold into which he constantly dipped for a handful." Ch.6 The beginning of Ch. 16 has a beautifully succinct line of his predicament, "How could he wish it to be lucid for others, for any one, that he, for the hour, saw reasons enough in the mere way the bright, clean, ordered water-side life came in at the open window?" Reasons, that is, to stay in beloved Paris. The denouement of the struggle between this sensibility and his deeply engrained New England morality becomes really beside the point. All the tergiversations and multiple reflections and subtle dialogue that convey the consciousness of a great soul constitute the book's undisputed prominence. I came away from the novel asking myself anew the question raised by Plato and other great philosophers and artists throughout history: What is beauty? What is the mysterious hold it has on us? And why do those who feel its power most acutely, such as Strether, suffer the most?

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Difficult prose, but comic and moving, August 15, 1999

By	The Baker Street Irregular (Staines) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ambassadors (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

The prose is certainly difficult, but the extra attention it requires from the reader yields benefits: the slightest nuance in the narrative registers. And, as in all late James, these subtle hints and nuances are of the essence.

I was rather surprised as to how funny it often was. But, as with many great comedies - "Twelfth Night", "Don Quixote" - there is a profound sadness under the surface. There is a passage near the beginning where Strether looks back on the disappointments of his life, and, in particular, his failure to communicate with or understand his son, who is now dead. This passage affected me so deeply, that I had to read it a few times before progressing with the rest of the novel.

Strether becomes increasingly aware that life has passed him by, and that in the course of it all, he has missed something: but what it is he has missed he can not specify. He urges the young people around him to live, but his instructions on how to do so are necessarily vague. Eventually, he has to to reject the narrow puritanical code which has fettered his life, but remains to the end a quixotic figure, clinging on to his moral integrity even when all around him appear to lose theirs. The closing episodes of this novel are as moving as anything I have read.