The Ambassadors-K

Ugh. I know I'm a bit of a speed reader who tends to skim, and miss things when the action in the book is moving slow, but reading this book was sooo... boring. I was warned. When I checked it out at the public library, the librarian asked why I would ever want to read this book. After explaining my read-alphabetical-order-classics list, he still looked at me like I was crazy, and said "Good luck."
In this book, American Strether goes over to Europe to retrieve his boss's son, Chad Newsome, who is suspected of immoral behaviors by his mother (Strether's boss) It should be known that Strether has an alleged crush on his boss and is hoping to win her approval. Upon arrival in Liverpool, he meets a friendly lady, Miss Gostrey and they quickly become good friends. Strether meets his old friend, Waymarsh, a fellow American living in Europe, who hates everything European, and is an all around grump. Eventually, Strether gets around to hunting down Chad, and when they meet up, it's horribly awkward. Chad is young, and carefree, while Strether is a wannabe young, carefree. The generational gap is more like a canyon. Eventually, you get a vague, tinkling of a hint of Chad's "immoral behavior" and it turns out there isn't any. He spends a lot of his time with an uppity French lady and young daughter, the Vionnets. But nothing happens. No one EVER comes out and says there's an affair going on. The young daughter marries some other random guy, and Mme. Vionnet, just gets emotional.
I don't know. By this point, I had just given up, and 90% of the book was way over my head. There were lots of conversations about nothing between the characters. And a lot of freaking out about nothing also happened between the characters. In the end I think the whole point of the book, was pretty much, Europe is where Chad wants to stay. He doesn't want to go home and be a mamma's boy, and Strether figured things out, and decided he didn't want to go back and kiss up to Mrs. Newsome either. Which, to me, does not seem like a whole lot to write a wordy novel over.