Finished The Good Soldier

I finished the book during my lunchroom supervision. Again, I think I am reading too fast for what I am writing here. The story becomes more complicated when one girl (she is very young and her name is Nancy) becomes attached to the Ashburnhams, and Edward falls in love with her. Mind you, this is the fourth woman he becomes attached with in the story. John Dowell, the narrator, is not the least upset at his wife's death; he is in fact happy about it. He has an interest in Nancy as well. In the end, Edward commits suicide, Leonore marries another man, Nancy goes insane and John is left to take care of her. There is, to be sure, a lack of sympathetic characters in this book, but it is so well written that it much more than enough makes up for it. I have to give Ford Madox Ford credit. All I knew about him was what Hemingway wrote about in "A Movable Feast," a book that should really be taken as fiction rather than biography. There Ford is presented as a sort of buffoon, a bumbling idiot who cares about "cutting people" (apparently looking the other way when he sees them) and having affairs with married women. Here's a little biography on Ford.

Like I said earlier, I think I am reading too fast for what I am writing. I want to write every day and it just occurred to me that it might be easier if I cut down on the pages I am trying to report. I would certainly do a much better job. And perhaps I should do all this writing as soon as I wake up in the morning (5:00 AM), and not take my lunch time to write but rather read. Oh, well. All in all, I wholeheartedly recommend "The Good Soldier" for its magnificent technique of storytelling and pace and honesty of language.