The Reverberator Henry James 9781542651646 Books
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The Reverberator is a short novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in Macmillan's Magazine in 1888 and then as a book later the same year. Accurately described by the leading web authority on Henry James as a "a delightful Parisian bonbon," this graceful comedy traces the complications that result when nasty but true stories about a Paris family get into the American scandal sheet of the novel's title.
The Reverberator Henry James 9781542651646 Books
One of the earliest put-downs of gossip and celebrity journalism.King Henry is very droll as his characters cope with the media.
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Tags : The Reverberator [Henry James] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Reverberator is a short novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in Macmillan's Magazine in 1888 and then as a book later the same year. Accurately described by the leading web authority on Henry James as a a delightful Parisian bonbon,Henry James,The Reverberator,CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform,1542651646,Classics,FICTION Classics,Fiction,Literature: Classics
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The Reverberator Henry James 9781542651646 Books Reviews
She seemed to be doing nothing as hard as she could.
The problem with this short novel from the 1880s is that there are no real people in it, only shadow lines of 2 dimensions. Between two fat novels (Princess Casamassima and Tragic Muse), James apparently felt obliged (publisher's pressure?) to produce something shorter and funnier. He did and some readers have liked it, but I can't quite warm up to it.
Usually, James' strength was in his psychological finesse, which could make me see an interest in people and problems that I might otherwise ignore. He does not achieve that here. Also, in general I like his shorter pieces better, but Francie and Gaston have left me cold. James' women are a subject of their own, and there is a lot of variation among them, but I can't remember any heroine as uninteresting as Francie. Nor any main male as boring as Gaston.
We have an encounter of 2 families in Paris, both of American origin, both, oddly, without mother. A wealthy man from Boston travels Europe with 2 daughters, a bossy but ugly one and a pretty but mindless one. A Frenchified resident family, whose wealth is based on property in Carolina, consists of a snobbish aging father, a do-nothing son, and 3 daughters married to various French aristocrats.
The do-nothing son and the pretty but mentally flat daughter get entangled, but even that happens without much excitement. The excitement comes from a slip by the girl she tells some family secrets to a failed suitor who works for an American scandal press product. That complicates things for a while, as the yellow press usually will. If the yellow press were more in the forefront of the story, the novel might be more interesting. As it is, I can't find it very funny.
The 'Reverberator' is not, as some readers might feverishly suppose, a hand-held device for erotic auto-stimulation, nor is it one of those fashionable quivery armchairs. No, it's the name on the masthead of an American tabloid, a racy gossip sheet, for which Mr. George Flack is the Parisian correspondent. The only vibrations you'll experience while reading this 1888 novella will be the shaking of your sides at Henry James's wry satire. Mr. Flack is the driving anti-hero of this tale, a prophetic verbal 'paparazzo' of sensationalist journalism, a man with a vision of the vulgar times we have to admit to be ours; speaking to a young woman he hopes to impress, he says "You ain't going to be able any longer to monopolize any fact of general interest, and it ain't going to be right you should; it ain't going to be possible to keep out anywhere the light of the Press... We'll see who's private then, and whose hands are off, and who'll frustrate the people -- the People that wants to know. That's a sign of the American people that they do want to know..." Mr Flack is the obnoxious harbinger of People Magazine, and of the politics of exposé and outright defamations that degrades American democracy today. The changing societal modes of privacy versus publicity are central themes of the two novellas James published together in his mid career, "The Reverberator" and "A London Life".
All the principal characters of The Reverberator are Americans in Paris. Mr. Flack's object of admiration is the winsome Francie Dosson, in Paris with her plain but ambitious older sister Delia and their wealthy retired father. The Dossons, to put it plainly, are rubes. Mr. Dosson is as culturally and intellectually blank as John Locke's slate; his only claim to any specific personhood has been his knack for making money through investments. Delia is 'horridly' declassé, vulgar to her toes. Francie is unaccountably beautiful and graceful, but she is exactly what modern observers would call an "airhead". Flack introduces her to yet another American in Paris, the 'rising' impressionist painter Waterlow, for whom Francie agrees to pose though she finds his paintings bizarre. At Waterlow's studio, another 'American' enters the story Gaston Probert, the scion of a Catholic family that migrated to France from the Carolinas in flight from abolition and democracy. The Proberts have wealth, still based in America, and have married into the staunchly reactionary French Legitimist aristocracy. They are the stiffest of snobs, but young Gaston is at sea over his own identity, unsure of his true national character and of his manly worth on the terms of either culture. Each character in this novella is simultaneously a stinging caricature and yet a perfectly plausible individual. The romantic tussle that results from their chance encounter reveals each of them to be exactly who they seem, even when they aren't quite capable of knowing themselves.
The Reverberator is a brilliant study of characters and a well-paced comic tale. Henry James's wit, to be sure, often takes the form of syntactical feints and pirouettes. Ah reckin thet sorta wit ain't fer ev'body ... and perhaps this accounts for the diffuse prejudice among readers today that James is a 'difficult' writer, more work than play. It's not so. "The Reverberator" and its companion "A London Life" are highly entertaining, even as they dig psychologically under the surface of ordinary human relations.
One of the earliest put-downs of gossip and celebrity journalism.
King Henry is very droll as his characters cope with the media.
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