Chad remains in Paris, determined to cleave to Mme de Vionnet (as he puts it) "to the death", and the prospect of Strether's own financially-transforming marriage to Mrs Newsome has vanished. But, for Strether, to have been "successful" in those terms would have been more desperately to have failed. As a result of the "drama of discrimination" into which he has wandered, Strether has been led into a richer field of life, and is now able to understand and judge the wasteland of his own earlier years. The advice he gives to one of Chad's friends — "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?" — is a melancholy comment on his own failure to grasp life when it seemed to be offered to him, and of which now he hears only its "receding whistle...miles and miles down the line". It is not a comfortable realisation. But Strether's embracing of it indicates his escape from previous constrictions, and his emergence into an atmosphere at once thinner and more spacious. To have returned to America, drawing Chad in chains behind him, to have married Mrs Newsome, and to have subsided once more into the moral rigidities of Woollett, the Massachusetts town of the Newsome factories and thus the source of the Newsome wealth, would have been a much more abject failure.
Ozick transplants the seed of this Jamesian drama from the late 19th century to the mid 20th. James's Paris was a "vast bright Babylon", home to a distracting profusion of languages (Mme Vionnet is said to have "a language quite to herself"). Like the city of antiquity, it is a seductive place which subdues and captivates those who presume to enter it as conquerors. Ozick reaches into a different part of the Bible for her Paris. It is a modern Nineveh, a place marked out for disaster, a "desolation' of which God eventually makes an "utter end". The Paris of Foreign Bodies is not the gilded playground of the fin de siècle. It is the shell of the city which survived the Nazi occupation, and which draws to it not the rich and talented so much as the rootless and dispossessed, the jetsam of a continent which war has turned into "a region of hell". In particular, the Jewish diaspora — both that phase of it following the Second World War, and earlier waves of dispersal which had preceded it — throws a long shadow over this novel.
Julian Nachtigall, the son of a wealthy Californian industrialist, had come to Paris for a year as part of his undergraduate degree. However, Julian repeatedly postpones his return, and after three years his father, Marvin, despatches Julian's aunt, Bea, to Paris to retrieve him.
In these years, still marked by postwar confusion, Paris is thronged with foreigners who fall into two groups: "one vigorous, ambitious, cheerful, and given to drink, the other pale, quarrelsome, forlorn: a squad of volatile maundering ghosts". The former are young Americans, "besotted with legends of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein". To begin with Julian naturally befriends this group. He sits in cafés trying to write a series of immoral fables, but he knows it is hopeless:
. . . he'd run with them and drunk with them, but he wasn't one of them, he didn't belong; he was always on the periphery. He tried and tried, he flattered them and scurried to catch up with them, he tried to deserve them, but finally they were sick of him or he was sick of them, he couldn't tell the difference. Either way it left him out.
But in the course of this charade Julian meets Lili, who belongs to the other group of foreigners in Paris, the "volatile maundering ghosts" who have been displaced by war. A Romanian whose husband and son were shot, and who bears on her own upper arm an unhealed bullet wound, Lili embodies the dreadful truth of what Europe has become. Julian falls in love with Lili, marries her, and pursues a hand to mouth existence with her in a series of cheap rooms and borrowed accommodation.
Bea, a middle-aged divorcée who works as a teacher of English in a rough New York school, enters this situation rather as Strether embarked on his own embassy. Like Strether, her past is stamped with disappointment and desertion — a failed marriage to a now— prosperous Hollywood composer, and her younger self's callow ambition to "make my mark in the world" lost to sight beneath years of sterility and undramatic immiseration. Initially she misreads Lili as nothing more than "human debris discharged from the diseased bowel of Eastern Europe". But slowly she comes to understand the truth of Lili's claim about her marriage to Julian, that (as Lili herself puts it) "I do him good." It dawns upon Bea that what Lili taught Julian was "Europe", and that "she thickened his mind". The ghost of James hangs over these words with a particularly attentive superintendence. Mme de Vionnet also claims that she does Chad "good" and in the preface to The Ambassadors James stated his creed that "it's only into thickened motive and accumulated character, I think, that the painter of life bites more than a little." In contrast with those in this Parisian inferno who pretend and lie, Lili has a straightforward relationship with language. Her maxim is "You should say what you know." In consequence, Bea marvels at Lili's paradoxical security in a world which has dealt her such savage blows: "How matter-of-fact she was; how formed and finished; how unperturbed and unsurprised. She was used to everything, and ready to expect anything. The world was as it was."
