The Reverberator
1888
Henry James writing a comedy about gossip? It sounds unlikely, but The Reverberator is exactly that: a razor-sharp satire about what happens when nasty but true stories about a respectable Paris family land in a New York scandal sheet. George Flack, a hungry American journalist in Paris, has his eye on the sweet, naive Francie Dosson, but it's his connections to the sensationalist press that threaten to blow up her family's carefully maintained reputation. Mr. Dosson floats through life passively, while his daughter Delia fights to protect the family name, and Francie remains blithely unaware of how close the catastrophe looms. James, who deplored the media, created something surprisingly prescient: a novel about the collision between privacy and publicity, between Old World dignity and New World tabloids. It reads like a prototype for every celebrity gossip column that would follow. For readers who think James is all heaviness and psychological density, this novella proves he could be genuinely funny - and uncomfortably relevant.
