"The Pupil" (1892)

"The Pupil" is short enough that it's probably more reasonable to consider it a story (or "tale," in the parlance) and be done with it. It's all at once a dense thrust of language and so lucid that its terms are clear from the start: a boy, a tutor, and the mother (and family) who hires the one for the other. Yet it never seems to go quite where you expect, and the ending, which is predictable enough, even so took me by surprise. In fact, a good many things are turned upside down in this. As usual with James it's often very funny, deceptively so. His authorial voice runs along in its eternally studied murmur and suddenly something happens—a turn of events or a turn of phrase—and one realizes he has just made a very sly joke, one that, in fact, is perfectly timed when you go back to look at it more closely. Follow along carefully, for example, with his use of the term "man of the world." But for all that, it turns tragic and effectively sad and moving in the end, simply by the expert way in which he continually turns expectations on their heads. The first—my first, anyway—is that this will be some variation on O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief" or maybe something by Booth Tarkington or Clarence Day (all of which would have come after this story, but bear with me), a wry, puckish account of an unruly boy and the adults who try to control him set approximately at the turn of the 20th century. Instead, it turns out to be the boy's family that is the source of problems, to a degree that grows increasingly pathological and less funny (even as the jokes keep coming, but now they sting). As usual, it's 98% Americans cast adrift in Europe, attempting to adapt to the social climes and make them work for themselves, even as they inevitably impose unsophisticated homegrown values one way and another. In the end the boy and tutor are enormously likeable and I found myself coming to hate the family every bit as much as the tutor comes to, a point that is initially baffling when it is brought out early as foreshadowing, before we have any more idea than the tutor what about them could engender such loathing.

"interlocutor" count = 1 / 41 pages

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