The Good Soldier

I just finished the book (I’m talking about Ford’s book, not Jaroslav Hašek’s comic work of a similar title, which is actually quite funny), and must be missing something. There seems to be a lot of praise out there for it, but I thought it was horrible. Some reasons:

*as stated in the previous post, the “American” narrator is about as un-American a character as I can imagine, even granted that he’s from the c. 1900 Europhiliac monied class

*First sentence of the novel: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” But I barely found it sad at all. OK, there are a couple of suicides and an insanity, a lot of marital infidelity, and the accidental death of a very short woman falling into a big suitcase and having it snap shut on her. All very sad in principle, but I felt unmoved by any of it, and I don’t exactly have a heart of stone.

*Utterly arbitrary descriptions of people’s motives that appear without adequate preparation, or indeed any preparation at all. Things like this: “For she was really cruel,” when no trace of cruelty whatsoever had been evident up till then.

*The “American” narrator tells us near the end that two of the characters (neither being his wife) were the only two people he had ever loved. But it was so unconvincing that you may as well just have rolled dice to determine which two people he had supposedly loved. It could have been any two names at random, and I would have been equally convinced/unconvinced. His feelings toward everyone seem to be bizarrely apathetic, and not deliberately so on the author’s part.

*He never gets to the point. This digressive and hazy style is presented as one of the book’s major innovations, but it made me lose concentration.

All right, enough said. Next time I’ll post about more books that I like, of which there are plenty.