The Good Soldier

I read this back in February, but I never got around to writing a review. The narration was excellent, and the writing is so good. I was drawn in right away. It is about marriage and impression management and the games people play. I would love to see it in a movie form!

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Ford’s tale, which he described as his attempt to incorporate into a novel “all that I knew about writing,” principally charts the tangled relationships between two “leisured” couples: the American John Dowell and his wife, Florence, and the philandering Edward Ashburnham (English gentleman and the “soldier” of the title) and his wife, Leonora. Ford’s artistry shows itself in the black comedy of Dowell’s narration, which appears at first to be meanderingly conversational and digressive but turns out to be as lethally well constructed as a ticking time bomb. Frequently cited as a “novelist’s novel” and as one of the great modernist works of the early part of the twentieth century, The Good Soldier was once described by a friend of Ford’s as “the finest French novel in the English language.”