The Reverberator, by Henry James
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The Reverberator, by Henry James
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"I guess my daughter's in here," the old man said leading the way into the little salon de lecture. He was not of the most advanced age, but that is the way George Flack considered him, and indeed he looked older than he was. George Flack had found him sitting in the court of the hotel—he sat a great deal in the court of the hotel—and had gone up to him with characteristic directness and asked him for Miss Francina. Poor Mr. Dosson had with the greatest docility disposed himself to wait on the young man: he had as a matter of course risen and made his way across the court to announce to his child that she had a visitor. He looked submissive, almost servile, as he preceded the visitor, thrusting his head forward in his quest; but it was not in Mr. Flack's line to notice that sort of thing. He accepted the old gentleman's good offices as he would have accepted those of a waiter, conveying no hint of an attention paid also to himself. An observer of these two persons would have assured himself that the degree to which Mr. Dosson thought it natural any one should want to see his daughter was only equalled by the degree to which the young man thought it natural her father should take trouble to produce her. There was a superfluous drapery in the doorway of the salon de lecture, which Mr. Dosson pushed aside while George Flack stepped in after him.
The Reverberator, by Henry James - Published on: 2015-10-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .46" w x 6.00" l, .61 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 202 pages
The Reverberator, by Henry James About the Author Henry James was born the son of a religious philosopher in New York City in 1843. His famous works include The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, Daisy Miller, and The Turn of the Screw. He died in London in 1916, and is buried in the family plot in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful. Good Vibes!?! By Gio 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.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Yes, there is such a thing as bad publicity. By mojosmom In our time, socialites, celebrities and people "famous for being famous" hire publicists and are content to have their private lives made fodder for the public press. Indeed, they are often complicit in the revelation of the most intimate details of their lives and seem to agree with the saying that "no publicity is bad publicity".Henry James would be shocked. Simon Nowell-Smith points out in his introduction to my edition of this novel James' reaction to a public report of a private conversation between Julian Hawthorne and James Russell Lowell; he called it a "beastly and blackguardly betrayal". But he took an incident in which a young American who had been admitted into Venetian society wrote an account of that society for a New York newspaper, and was widely excoriated in Venice for so doing, and turned it into this charming novel.The Dossons, father and two daughters, serious Delia and flighty Francie, are Americans in Paris. Coming over, they had made the acquaintance of George Flack, a journalist whose job is to find stories for an American 'society-paper'. He has attached himself to the Dossons, showing them Paris, while smoking Mr. Dosson's cigars, spending his money, and having a flirtation with Francie. He introduces her to the expatriate Impressionist portraitist, Charles Waterlow (possibly based on John Singer Sargent?) who begins to paint her portrait. During the sittings, she meets a young man, Gaston Probert, an American who had never been in America, having been born and raised in France, his father a "Gallomaniac", his sisters having married into French society (two into the nobility). Inevitably, Francie and Gaston fall in love, and, after her charm overcomes some familial objections of the Proberts, they become engaged.All is going swimmingly, Francie is taken into the bosom of the Proberts, learning the ways of French society, until Gaston heads to the United States to take care of some business for his family, as well as for Mr. Dosson. While he is away, George Flack re-appears. One lesson Francie has not learned is that a young engaged woman does not go out alone with a young man who is not her betrothed. But she takes the view that Flack is an old acquaintance and what's the harm? The harm turns out to be that he, by judicious questioning and saying he merely wants to write about Waterlow's painting of her, sets her chattering about her fiancé's family, and the resultant newspaper story causes a storm. Francie still cannot quite understand the harm she has done. "I thought he would just speak about my being engaged and give a little account; so many people in America would be interested." What she doesn't grasp is that the Proberts do not want "people in America" (or France, for that matter) to be interested in their private lives."The Reverberator" was first written as a serial in early 1888, and published in book form shortly thereafter. James extensively revised it twenty years later, but my edition is that of the 1888 book. Nowell-Smith's introduction, which compares this and the later edition, shows that the revisions were not an improvement! The ease of language here, very different from James' later "tortuosity of expression", perfectly expresses the wide-eyed naïveté of Francie.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Flatliners By H. Schneider 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.
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