The Europeans Book

Oil and Vinegar

After reading The American, I find myself with a sort of Mirror Image in The Europeans. In the former the American man, who feels boundless, explores, and gets burnt, in the Europe full of boundaries. In The Europeans, we find a couple of siblings who feel bound and look for a way out in the open and clear new world. This time there is a split, for we are talking

The contraposition of America and its values and Europe and its culture is an ongoing theme in James's works - just as oil and vinegar are found, in one way or another, in most salads. Sometimes their respective flavors and textures mix well; sometimes they remain distinctly apart, without resolving into an emulsified blend.

The title is however somewhat misleading. The Europeans are not really such. They are the offspring of uprooted Americans, who have grown knowing that there was always an alternative to their existence. Different from the Europeans who, unless forced by dire conditions, would not consider once that their lives could be lived otherwise.

But the title is not misleading in that these siblings remain undefined in their 'Europeanness'. They speak English, French, Italian and German, and are not really rooted in any particular European country. Their 'otherness' in the clear, sober, defined, austere, constrained world remains somewhat theoretical and vague.

This second novel presents a much more restricted setting than the one in The American and the reader often feels as if she is were facing a stage in the theater. The profusion of lively and effective dialogue, that can be easily quoted or recited, as well as the enclosed spaces, and the emphasis on costumes, contradicts somehow the suggestion of the limitless space of the New World. This theatrical tone ought not to surprise the reader, however, given that James, if unsuccessful, had always wanted to write drama.

At the end, the plot and the characters are clearly closed in and resolved in a somewhat uncharacteristic fashion for this writer. And this reinforces the nature of this short novel as a light comedy; the curtains are drawn and the spectators can gather their belongings and go back to their daily lives without further ado.

But James called this a 'sketch' - and it seems that differently to the pictorial artists, he understood sketches as more defined than the final work with a more loose texture.

The oil and vinegar succeeded in making this a delicious read.