The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915). A novel made seminally modernist through an unreliable narration that is part cubist, part Freudian, it tells the story of the prissy and rather thick John Dowell and his wife Florence who repeatedly meet British soldier Edward Ashburnham and his wife over the years at various upper-crust European spas. Dowell’s blindness to Edward and Florence’s hidden-in-plain-sight affair finally lifts, but his class solidarity with the man he calls a “good soldier” endures—a tension that creates an exquisite portrait of denial and the death throes of Edwardian gentility.
Total Points: 41 (JBarn 4) (MG 10) (DL 8) (CN 9) (TP 6) (APat 4)