an unconvincing character

For a series of chance reasons, I happen to be spending a bit of leisure time these days reading Ford Maddox Ford’s 1915 novel The Good Soldier. (Despite the title, it’s not a war story at all, but a somewhat boring description of the life of two adulterous couples from the early 20th century leisure class.) I don’t like the book, but that’s not the point of this post.

The point of the post is this: the narrator has to be the most absurdly unconvincing American character in the history of literature. Didn’t Ford actually know any real Americans? He must have known many, but he apparently didn’t observe any of their habits or speech very closely. The narrator’s way of speaking is English. His particular sense of decorum is English. His lifestyle is English. The particular ways in which he is inhibited are the English ones rather than the American ones. His historical references are of the sort that English people would make but Americans never.

And it’s not even that the narrator is an affected American Anglophile à la T.S. Eliot, one who’s simply trying to act the part. No, he’s an English character who has been arbitrarily decreed by the author to be American. The effect is really bizarre. I’ve never seen anything like it, in fact.

As an analogy, imagine if all of Proust were arbitrarily decreed to be taking place in Springfield, Illinois, and that you as a reader simply had to swallow that absurdity. Or Kafka’s The Trial in one of the Caribbean island nations.