Widely regarded to be Henry James' best novel, The Ambassadors is the story of Lambert Strether, a man who has endured a lifetime of emotional starvation, who finally finds nourishment in Paris. He has been sent by his fiancée to retrieve her wayward son and return him to Wollett, Massachusetts so that he can take control of the family business. Arriving in Paris, however, Strether finds that contrary to the fears of his mother and sister, Chad Newsome has been much improved by his time in Europe. He also falls under the spell of Marie de Vionette, the woman to whom credit is due for Chad's newfound sophistication.
Having realized that he's missed out on the best that life has to offer, Strether switches course and begins encouraging Chad to stay in Europe, which in turn would provide him with an excuse to continue his late in life awakening. It also inspires Mrs. Newsome to send a new set of ambassadors, this time in the form of Chad's sister, Sarah, and her husband. Sarah is the antithesis of Strether, sees ugliness in all that he has found beautiful, and her arrival essentially signals the end of Strether's engagement to her mother. In a way Strether has now been made free, however the things he has yet to learn about Europe (and himself) will ultimately make it impossible for him to stay behind and he finds himself forced to return to the United States.
The story of The Ambassadors is relatively small; it's a story of manners, a story without a great deal of plot movement. With James, however, it expands into a whole universe of impressions due to his tendency to pack each and every sentence to capacity. His prose is ornate but never tiresome and the novel contains passages of incredible beauty and finely, exquisitely constructed characters. Though I ultimately prefer The Golden Bowl, James' follow-up novel, The Ambassadors has a lot to recommend it.
"It was a good idea to practice jumping into his own character again, because the time might come when he would need to be in a matter of seconds, and it was strangely easy to forget the exact timbre of Tom Ripley's voice. He conversed with Marge until the sound of his own voice in his ears was exactly the same as he remembered it."
Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley borrows the germ of its premise from James, sending her protagonist to Europe in order to bring home an errant son. In setting the stage for the plot, Highsmith even tacitly acknowledges the debt, writing, "Mr. Greenleaf was chuckling again, asking him if he had read a certain book by Henry James." It is here, however, that the similarities end, as in all other respects sociopathic Tom Ripley has nothing in common with poor, gentle Lambert Strether. Ripley is all ruthless envy, raging Id, selfish desire.
As The Talented Mr. Ripley opens, Ripley is in New York, feeling the heat from a tax scam that he's sure is about to get busted. When the opportunity arises to sail to Europe on Mr. Greenleaf's dime, he leaps at it and sets off to reacquaint himself with Dickie Greenleaf. He falls in love with Dickie's life (and, perhaps, with Dickie himself) and when it looks as though his access is about to be cut off, he does what to him seems most logical: he murders Dickie and takes over his identity. Unfortunately one murder leads to another and Ripley's double life quickly begins to unravel.
One of the most intriguing aspects of Highsmith's writing is that she's so utterly sympathetic to her villainous character. She wants him to be rewarded for his amorality and since we experience the story from his point of view, experience that sense of the walls closing in at each turn of the plot, we can't help but feel relief when he escapes - though, like Ripley, we know that relief is temporary. Ripley "gets away" with it but he does so knowing that he'll spend the rest of his life looking over his sholder, expecting the other shoe to finally drop. The Talented Mr. Ripley is a masterpiece of tension and Ripley one of the great hero/villains of fiction.
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