The Pension Beaurepas

A young American arrives in Geneva with a novelist's ambitions and a Stendhal-inspired hunger to study human nature. He takes rooms at the modest Pension Beaurepas, where he settles into the peculiar business of watching people. The boarding house becomes his laboratory: Madame Beaurepas presides over a rotating cast of boarders, an old Frenchman, a melancholy American patriot, various drifting Englishmen, each offering up their quirks for dissection. But it's the arrival of the Ruck family that sparks the real drama: coarse, pushy Americans whose collision with European refinement sets the narrator's observer's instincts ablaze. James deploys his protagonist as both participant and anthropologist, recording the small tensions, the unspoken hierarchies, the comedy of people too close together. The result is a glittering early work about the distance between how we see ourselves and how others see us, and the pretense that separates the observed from the observer.