The Reverberator

The Reverberator is a short novel by Henry James, first serialised in Macmillan’s Magazine across 1888 and published in book form the same year. It is a light comedy by James standards, sitting in the middle of his career when he was producing the dense psychological novels but still occasionally writing for a wider audience.

The Reverberator of the title is an American society newspaper, the kind that prints intimate gossip about wealthy expatriates in Europe. Francie Dosson is a young American woman in Paris with her father and sister. She becomes engaged to Gaston Probert, a young Frenchified American from an old family who has lived all his life in France and married into French aristocratic society. The plot turns on a journalist named George Flack, who knew the Dossons in Boston and who comes to Paris hoping to write up the Probert family for his paper.

Francie, in a moment of innocent confiding, tells Flack many private things about the Proberts. These get printed. The scandal that follows nearly breaks the engagement and certainly breaks the peace of an old French house that had not realised what an American newspaper could do. The novel is funny about Flack, who is unscrupulous in a frank cheerful American way, and it is gentle about Francie, who genuinely had no idea that ordinary conversation could become a newspaper article.

It is shorter and lighter than most of the novels around it, and James meant it that way. He called it a piece of light prose in a letter, and that is the right description. For a reader looking for a James novel that does not demand a long commitment, The Reverberator is one of the easiest to recommend. It pairs naturally with The Aspern Papers from the same period, which handles the question of literary privacy with a heavier touch.