Brilliant Michael Dirda (many of my colleagues know him as a reviewer of Lovecraftian/Gothic/Weird fiction) about F.M. Ford.
Did we really “have it all” (meaning the best iterations of a classical novel) in the 20th century? Looks like it.
In truth, for relentless and layered tricksiness, only Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire can rival The Good Soldier. It employs the entire modernist playbook—a carefully orchestrated, almost fugue-like unfolding of the action, multiple time-shifts, a limited narrator, symbolic historical allusions, the speeding up and slowing down of narrative pace, foreshadowings and reversals, double entendres, and much else.
In particular, the novel’s surface text, reliant on ambiguity, foregrounds the untrustworthiness of first impressions. Dowell’s wife, for example, likes instructing people about European history, so it’s only later that one begins to wonder about the statement “At that time the Captain was quite evidently enjoying being educated by Florence.
[...] Reading them [a series of memoirs—E.T.], as well as such related books as The English Novel (1929), The Critical Attitude (1911), and The March of Literature (1938), one can almost hear Ford talking about books, art, writing. He castigates Dickens for breaking novelistic illusion with authorial intrusions, even as he praises Austen’s consummate artistry. Among his “private preferences,” he ranks Trollope’s Framley Parsonage “higher than any other English novel.” Nearly everything worth knowing about the art of fiction, he maintains, can be learned from attentive study of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education. Turgenev was “the greatest poet in prose who ever used the novel as the vehicle for his self-expression.” ©
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