The Reverberator by Henry James, with an introductory note by Simon Nowell-Smith
New York: Grove Press, 1979 (first published 1888) ISBN 0394170792
It's been a long time since I've read any Henry James. In fact it's over twenty years - I remember reading The Turn of the Screw and Portrait of a Lady at university with mixed emotions - I loved the former, and was almost bored by the latter. As evinced by the shelves of my local university library, James was very much in fashion and the critical darling during my university years, but the intervening decades have seen his star (along with many other Victorian novelists) wane.
Which brings us to The Reverberator, one of James' "lighter" works, but still a novel of manners, of the new meeting the old,of America colliding with Europe, and even, from the viewpoint of 2022, a glimpse into the future of celebrity culture and social media!
The story in a nutshell revolves around Francie, an ingenue American, who is courted by George Flack, who writes for the American society newspaper The Reverberator. He unwittingly introduces her to Gaston Probert, a member of a French/American family that has married into aristocracy and who falls head-over-heels for Francie. Flack tricks Francie into telling him all about the Proberts, and he then publishes a muck-raking story about them, much to the disgrace and embarrassment of all. After prolonged musing, Gaston decides to throw up his family for the sake of Francie.
The novel is light, and made of of discreet scenes (it was first published in installments in Macmillan's Magazine) of a very Jamesian character: much intricate description of location, sensibilities and feelings foreboding some action, but with the action often happening "offstage".
It's interesting to me how tastes have changed - the book now feels very old-fashioned, which I don't think I would have thought twenty years ago. James' long-winded exposition is from a previous time: interestingly the short introduction notes that this edition uses the early edition, not the later "updated" (i.e. more wordy) revision that James made later. If you mainly read more modern fiction, this book feels almost baroque.
As a social commentary, there is much that is of its time, but also some prescience. The Reverberator shows us that the social media storms of today are not something new, just a more instantaneous expression of something that has been actually going on for millennia. James is also no doubt poking fun at both the mores of the French and the Americans - Gaston and his family are almost unbelievably stuck-up and stuffy, Francie too innocent to be true, and Delia (Francie's older sister) too archetypically pushy and snobbish. Francie and Delia's father, like many older men in James' books is wealthy but ineffectual.
Thinking about it, The Reverberator is a nice way into the work of Henry James: it's less complex than some of his greater works and so is easy to get into, but still with all that makes James who he was. Not sure about this one - I imagine people these days will rarely read any Henry James, and if you are only going to read one James work, it should probably be one his better known ones (The Turn of the Screw is probably the best place to start), but The Reverberator is a nice light piece of Victoriana.
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