Rating  - Lame.
This book is written by an annoying, weak man. The formal innovations are vaguley interesting, but in any case do not rescue the work from its primary deficit: you must sit there for several hours with the voice of a neurotic chatty little wimp who reminds one of a certain kind of homosexual man streaming through your mind, mostly in the form of digressions and non-sequitors. This is neither entertaining nor enlightening, and since it's the product of design it is actually a little infuriating. I too listen with good faith to the academic hierarchy present and past for recommendations, and I had in my version the hitherto utterly reliable Frank Kermode as Introducer; but damn, this book - its characters, its plots, its language, its taxing convolusions - is just annoying. Its only virtue is that reading it might raise awareness that vaguely condescending moralistic little works like this about unheroic, petty, neurotic, sordid, idle, superficially cosmopolitan people are a mistake to begin with, and - since we all have only 70 or 80 years on earth and aren't all compulsive aesthetes - time would be better spent elsewhere. There is nothing of the hard Sophoclean light here.
Rating - The good soldier
I know that I will outrage alot of people with this review but here goes... This is one of only 2 books that I have ever read that I truly REGRET devoting the time to , but once I start a book I always finish.I don't know what else to say except that it was painful for me to finish this. I just don't get it. The main character was quite annoying to me and the story was SO SLOW and predictable I really just wanted it to end. I would not recommend this book for fun and if it is required reading for you I am sorry.
Rating  - The Saddest Story
I think this is the first novel I've ever read twice. It's an odd choice for that, as it's not my favorite. I read it in college at the recommendation of my creative writing professor, who thought it might be helpful in structuring a story on which I was working. And the structure, more than anything, is the most innovative part of the book. An example of literary impressionism, the narrator paints the story with small brush strokes, a scene here and there, out of order, from different perspectives. He examines each character individually, because it is more about the characters and their motivations than it is about the plot. It is left to the reader to put the pieces together--the narrator gives more of an impression than a complete picture.
But THE GOOD SOLDIER is #30 on The Modern Library's top novels of the 20th century, which means that it must have more than just structure. I have to admit that, until I got to the very end, both times I read the book, I wondered what the allure was. The book's first sentence is "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." But throughout, I kept getting the feeling that it was little more than a jumbled romantic melodrama. The characters are all flawed in ways that makes them real but not particularly likable. They are all extremely well off, which makes their dismal state even more frustrating--these people have everything--Why aren't they happy? But then in the end, somehow--and maybe it's just the last few pages that do it--I realize that these characters are great. Particularly Edward Ashburnham, the soldier of the book's title, is a very likable character. And we're almost willing to overlook his one vice--his womanizing--partly because he's such a sentimentalist but mostly because his wife is such a wretch, the only truly wicked character in the book.
As for the plot, it's almost not worth detailing. As I said, it's more about the characters and how the plot is structured than the plot itself. There are five principle characters: Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, John and Florence Dowell, and Nancy Rufford. Two commit suicide, one goes crazy, and the other two suffer perhaps the worse fate of living completely plain, boring, lonely lives. In the end, it is a very sad story, if for no other reason than that most of it is so unnecessary--with the exception of Leornora, any of these people could have lived happy lives if it weren't for each other.
Rating  - The Good Soldier
I had always heard good things about Ford Maddox Ford, but this was rather a disappoint. He comes across as a second-rate Henry James, with no where near the subtlety of James. The subtlety of Ford seems rather artificially contrived, and his narrator a fake American. Also, his characters are really not all that interesting. Fake, fake, fake.
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