The Ambassadors

This cracked me up. This guy has set out to read the entire MLA list of the 100 best novels and write a capsule review of each one. He’s not a fan of The Ambassadors by Henry James. This was my favorite part of his review: “[I]n 1903 two chapters were reversed. It was a blatant error. The chapter that took place in the evening was followed by the one that took place in the morning. In the former chapter, a character referred to a conversation that hadn’t happened yet. A horrible error you think, right? Henry James fans would be complaining and yelling, right? Well, it remained unnoticed for FIFTY YEARS. You heard me; for half a century people were talking about and analyzing this book, forcing students to read it, and never noticed that two of the chapters were in the wrong order. The error was finally noticed by a Stanford Undergraduate, Robert Young, in 1950. Literary James scholars were anxious to get a quotation from this brilliant young man who had made such a significant discovery. What words of praise for James would their new hero give them for posterity? Let’s quote Robert Young: ‘There must be something radically wrong with a writing style that has managed to obscure an error of this magnitude for so many years from the probing eyes of innumerable readers, publishers, editors, critics, and even the author himself.'”