The Ambassadors

Lambert Strether, engaged to the formidable, largely unseen Mrs. Newsome back in Woollett, Massachusetts, is dispatched to Paris to retrieve her son Chad from whatever's kept him abroad, and finds Chad transformed: polished, socially fluent, plainly improved by an attachment Strether assumes must be a Frenchwoman's corrupting influence. Instead he meets Madame de Vionnet, elegant, separated, and older than Chad, and finds himself persuaded that whatever she's given him looks less like vice than education, a civilizing influence Strether comes to envy rather than condemn.

James builds the novel almost entirely around the slow drift of Strether's own perception, his advice to a young acquaintance to live all you can becoming the book's most quoted line and its central irony, offered before Strether has fully registered how much of his own life he's failed to live. The real tension isn't whether he'll bring Chad home to Woollett but whether Strether can keep believing in the virtuous-attachment theory he's built once the evidence in front of him starts working against it.

Once Strether's letters home go quiet, Mrs. Newsome dispatches a second embassy, her daughter Sarah Pocock and Sarah's husband, whose rigid moral certainty about Chad's situation throws Strether's own compromised, more permissive vision into unflattering relief, and their arrival turns what had been an internal, contemplative novel into something closer to a diplomatic standoff between two entirely incompatible ways of judging the same set of facts.

Chad's young expatriate friend Little Bilham describes the arrangement with Madame de Vionnet to Strether as a virtuous attachment, a phrase Strether seizes on and repeats to himself for months as license to stop worrying and start admiring, and James lets the reader watch an ambassador build an entire moral position on a term one minor character offered almost carelessly, a case study in how badly Strether wants to be told what he's already decided to believe.