The Europeans (1878)

I'm not sure this would be the place to start with Henry James but it's an interesting way station—early enough that it reads as almost a crude and certainly an awkward and even shallow version of James at his various peaks. At the same time it has all the themes and stylings we have come to know so well, notably the mix of American and European 19th-century cultures encountering one another. Here the more usual dynamic is turned upside down, with a pair of European cousins traveling to the New England hinterlands of Boston to meet their American counterparts. The Americans are stamped all over with stereotypes—rugged and dour Puritans of naïve spirituality. One friend of the family is a Unitarian minister; another in their circle is reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays on her deathbed. The European cousins by contrast are worldly and "Bohemian," at ease with levels of privilege and status, and charming as hell too. James takes the bunch and stirs them all up with the wooden spoon of the comedy of manners, and soon enough the characters begin to fall in love with one another in any number of vaguely incongruous ways. The resolutions are neat, more so than we usually get from James or, probably, than he entirely approved himself later in his career. The big bow tying it all up happens to be perfectly symmetrical, which throws an unfortunate (and surprising) whiff of the hack over it. And no one seems to have a dark heart, as James would later make a point of working in regularly, taking his cues perhaps from Jane Austen, the real master at this kind of thing. So, no, not necessarily the place to start with James. But worth a stop if you appreciate him, often quite beguiling all in its own right and refreshingly free of the intricate cross-hatchings of meaning and intent that can grow wild and confusing and beautiful as kudzu in his later works. The Europeans is obvious, done in broad strokes, and rarely subtle. A daisy, let us say, among the orchids of his shelf.

The Interlocutor Count
As I traveled recently through a used-bookstore find of James's oddly-sized works I idly began to catalog his use of the word "interlocutor," which I have long had the impression he is wont to use in profusion—it's a word I associate entirely with him. Merriam-Webster defines it: "1. One who takes part in dialogue or conversation. 2. A man in the middle of the line in a minstrel show who questions the end men and acts as leader." Needless to say, perhaps, I have never known James to use it in the second sense (and I have never known anyone else ever, anywhere, to use it at all, which might say something about my 19th-century reading habits). In the case of The Europeans, where it appears only once, I wonder if James might not have inserted it himself years later when he returned to his earlier work for some revisions.

"interlocutor" count = 1/145 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)