The Reverberator, which was originally published in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1888, is about Americans abroad and the increasing intrusiveness of a certain kind of gossipy newspaper. It’s also, mostly, about people: how they act, what they say, what motivates them. It’s set in Paris, but aside from a trip to Saint-Germain and a ride through the Bois de Boulogne, we hardly see the city or its environs: it’s a very interior book, set mostly in the hotel where Francie Dosson, her sister Delia, and their father have rooms, or in the studio where Francie has her portrait painted, or in the family home of Gaston Probert, Francie’s husband-to-be. In addition to the Dossons and to Probert and his family, the key figure in the book is George Flack, who is a reporter for the Reverberator and also a suitor of Francie. Mr. Dosson is very rich, and Flack wants Francie’s money; Probert, a sort of hack of a painter with money of his own from his family, wants her beauty. But what does Francie want? Well, it’s not entirely clear, maybe even to her. (Her sister, Delia, is the forceful one; Francie is described as having “an unformed voice and very little knowledge” (15).)
So, right: the Dossons are in Paris. They met Flack a year earlier, on the boat over, and he’s showing them a good time in the city, taking them to nice restaurants (ordering meals that Mr. Dosson happily pays for), and being smitten with Francie. Flack takes Francie to the studio of a painter, Charles Waterlow, who will paint her portrait; Probert is there hanging out with Waterlow and is enchanted by Francie’s beauty. Francie and Probert get engaged, but he’s worried about needing to win over his family: they’re American but his sisters are all married to French aristocrats, and the Dossons are common by comparison, and he won’t marry without his family’s approval. Francie is worried about Probert’s family too, convinced she’ll do something to alienate them. And so it’s no surprise when she does: she talks to Flack about them, he publishes a piece in the paper, and the Proberts flip out at the scandalous things it says about them (e.g. that a sister-in-law is a kleptomaniac, that the husband of one of Gaston’s sisters is having an affair). But why, exactly, does Francie do it: is she clueless? Is she, as she says, just repaying Flack for his kindnesses to her family? Is she trying to sabotage her chances of marriage to Probert? Is she trying to force him to choose between his family and her?
I can see the reasons this is an interesting book, and it has some excellent funny moments. I like this description of how dependent the Dossons become on Flack: “He made them feel indeed that they didn’t know anything about anything, even about such a matter as ordering shoes—an art in which they vaguely supposed themselves rather strong” (22). Or Mr. Probert the elder on Francie: “She says ‘Parus,’ my dear boy” (94). (Oh, snap.) But it wasn’t totally my style: I wanted more description, more Paris (Parus?), more long delicious Jamesian sentences like this:
The court was roofed with glass; the April air was mild; the cry of women selling violets came in from the street and, mingling with the rich hum of Paris, seemed to bring with it faintly the odour of the flowers. There were other odours in the place, warm, succulent and Parisian, which ranged from fried fish to burnt sugar; and there were many things besides: little tables for the post-prandial coffee; piles of luggage inscribed (after the initials, or frequently the name, R.P. Scudamore or D. Jackson Hatch), Philadelphia, Pa., or St. Louis, Mo.; rattles of unregarded bells, flittings of tray-bearing waiters, conversations with the second-floor windows of admonitory landladies, arrivals of young women with coffinlike bandboxes covered with black oilcloth and depending from a strap, sallyings forth of persons staying and arrivals, just afterwards, of other persons to see them; together with vague prostrations on benches of tired heads of American families. (17)
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