When I read the Paris Reviews interviews, the great writers of the 1930s-1940s kept bringing up Ford Madox Ford as one of the writers they admired most. I’d never heard of him. His best-known book is The Good Soldier, which I’d also never heard of. Yet at that time it was generally considered to be one of the greatest books of the 20th century.

Reputation is a funny thing. Ford’s reputation was as high as it was partly because he made a lot of friends. And it fell as low as it did because, eventually, he made a lot of enemies. People thought he was egotistical, and didn’t believe half the things he said about himself. He really did write books together with Joseph Conrad, but after Conrad’s death, some people got very upset with Ford for talking about it so much; I suppose they thought he was just making stuff up again. It also didn’t help that he wrote only autobiography and autobiographical fiction, and wrote other real people into his novels. According to a Teaching Company lecture I heard, the literary world more-or-less conspired to erase him from the canon after his death.

To which I say: No great loss.

I only read the first half of The Good Soldier, but I read plot reviews, and there’s clearly no reason to read the second half. It’s famous for being one of the (maybe the) first major works using an unreliable narrator, and so he’s considered a father of modernism. But it’s badly done unreliable narration; I can’t believe the narrator is that stupid or self-deceptive. Ford’s writing style is very good, but he has little to say.

The story is about 2 upper-class couples who spend 9 years together, travelling about Europe, inseparable all that time. Then, at the end of that 9 years, the narrator learns that the other couple’s marriage is completely dysfunctional (as is his own), and that his wife’s been cheating on him with the other husband all along. That’s pretty much it, except that there’s also a young woman, now age 22, who is never mentioned until halfway through the book when you learn she’s been constantly with them every moment all this time.

One of the major criticisms I hear of fan-fiction is that the people who write it don’t create their own characters. In my opinion, that’s a good thing. I image it might be good practice every now and again. If you’re forced to use characters that already exist, you have to come up with stories that work with characters that already exist. If, on the other hand, your story can’t possibly work with any character that anyone has written about before, it’s probably not a true story, and you shouldn’t write it.

This is the case with The Good Soldier. It’s often reviewed positively as a shocking exposé of the shallowness of the upper class. But it can’t be, because all 4 of his main characters are insane. I’m not particularly fond of the upper class, but this is more a freak show than a commentary on real life. Things like this might have happened, but calling it an exposé of the upper class is like calling a biography of Charles Manson an exposé of the 1960s.

I suppose they are all exaggerations of things that happen in many people to a lesser degree.

I learned pretty near the start what had happened. I kept reading because the narrator was engaging; it felt like listening to a good storyteller. But I began wondering why I was supposed to keep reading. I knew how it ended. All of the characters are contemptible, so I didn’t care about any of them. I had only a mild curiosity as to how things had played out.

When I came to the end of Part 1 (of 4), I seriously wondered why I was supposed to keep reading. There were no unanswered questions and nobody I cared about.

When I came to the end of Part 2, I wondered the same thing.

Partway through Part 3, I decided to read plot reviews online and find out whether there was anything else to the book, some twist or something. There wasn’t.

This book is entirely psychological, and so the only reason to read it is for its psychological analysis of its characters. But there isn’t any. The characters are all incredibly warped. We get a pretty good picture of how each one is warped, some impression of how each one feels, but no idea why they’re warped that way.

That’s because they’re not plausible characters. They’re cheap plot devices. They all have bizarre personality deficits, yet even those deficits aren’t sufficient to make them act in the self-destructive ways they do. We’re repeatedly told that the “good soldier” of the title is a very, very good man, doing all sorts of charitable work–but the author obviously just stuffed that in there to make him seem “complex”; none of it feels real or motivated.

The narrator appears to be based on Ford himself, and, if we believe what others wrote of Ford, his unbelievable denseness might just be how Ford really was. He was repeatedly accused of not being able to distinguish fantasy from reality in his own life, and not knowing what he had and had not done. Which might mean that the unreliable narrator was invented not as a clever literary device, but because a crazy man wrote fiction.