Just about had it with The Ambassadors

You know I'm a very patient reader and willing to work on very difficult books hoping to derive from reading them some pleasure, knowledge, experience, all of that - but you also know that I'm not stubborn or foolhardy and have never understood the compulsion to finish a book once started - why? what's the point? whom do you owe that to? drop it and move on - as long as you've given it a fair shot: there are many books that I've soured on for a day or so or that took a while to grab me or that demanded more than usual from me and it took me a while to enter into the world of the author - would anyone fall in love with Faulkner? Joyce? on reading the first few pages? And yet, and yet - I think I've just about had it with Henry James's "The Ambassadors" - I keep trying to like it, wanting to like it - potentially, it's a great set-up: an older man devoid of feeling sets off for Europe to "rescue" a younger man from its clutches and bring him home - but the older man is won over by the charms of Europe, and its denizens, and fails in his mission in some dramatic way (or maybe not - maybe the young man returns to the U.S. and the old man stays in Paris?) - well, no one in their right mind ever read a James novel for its plot, its action, its pacing, or its humor - all of which are either nonexistent, minimal, or soporific. I would like The Ambassadors more if he'd just get it moving - in my mind, I'm comparing it with other James works I've read in the past year or so, Portrait of a Lady, The Princess Cassamassima, The Aspern Papers, to name three - all of which have a great set-up and then a great payoff, the characters move along with their lives, grow, develop, make terrible mistakes, have real misunderstandings, make decisions, and face consequences. In The Ambassadors, the set-up is there, but the characters just talk forever and negotiate slightest, tiniest nuances of feeling and perception - half the time I don't even know what they're talking about, and when I do it seems they take forever to come to any conclusion or point of vantage. This leaden style is a flaw I'm afraid of all the late James novels - I've been completely unable to read Golden Bowl and Wings of the Dove, and thought I would do better with The A's, which I read many years ago and at least managed to finish (for a class) - but now, I don't know, there's something dreadfully wrong with the way he was thinking and writing at this time of his life - either his style or his own emotional hangups just keep getting in the way of his work. William James famously said of his brother that the could "chew a bit more than he can bite off." How true! I've had enough of his chew, or chaw. I'm giving it a few more days - maybe I'm just cranky - but I'm afraid it's going in the drawer along with Golden Bowl and Wings. Good night!