HENRY James's rereading of The American led him to the bemused perception that he “had been plotting arch-romance without knowing it” and that in retrospect the novel “yields me no interest and no reward comparable to the fond perception of this truth.” Other readers, whether or not they accept the label of romance, have been less indulgent and in particular have faulted The American for its apparent change of course two-thirds of the way through. Even those who are fondest of the novel have been aware that it changes radically in tone and mode at the moment of Christopher Newman's betrayal by the Bellegardes. As Leon Edel summarily states: “What happened to The American was that it set off in one direction – a direction that gave great pleasure to its readers – and then it sharply veered into pathos and disaster.” What has up to this point been largely a social comedy, broad, amused, generally good-natured, suddenly calls forth the emotional conditions and the vocabulary of melodrama, unleashing a new and heightened drama for which the reader had scarely been prepared, one that alters the very stakes of the text.

Early in chapter 18, as Newman makes his way into the Hotel de Bellegarde: “He felt, as soon as he entered the room, that he was in the presence of something evil; he was startled and pained, as he would have been by a threatening cry in the stillness of the night.”