Book # 69 Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

A couple of weeks ago, I went down to the used book shop at the Santa Monica Public Library and literally bought a huge stack of books for ten dollars! With that purchase, Lucinda and I now have copies of about half of the books on this list. Some of the books in that stack I've always wanted to read while others I had never heard of.  I thought I knew what I was going to read next, but then I got the idea that I should pick a book that I knew absolutely nothing about. So that's how I ended up with Sons and Lovers. Before I picked it up all I knew was that D.H. Lawrence had written Lady Chatterley's Lover which faced some censorship issues in the past and may or may not be smutty.  I made sure not to read the back cover of the book and luckily the front cover gave no indication of what the book is about.

The book is broken into two parts. The first third of the book is about a family, the Morels, living in England in the late 1800's. The father is a coal miner and a drunk and the mother is pretty much dissatisfied with her life. They have four children and a bunch of stuff happens (accidents, kids growing up, illness, etc). I found this part really enjoyable because there were a lot of interesting characters and the conflicts within the family dynamics were fascinating. Plus I found Lawrence's writing style pretty unique. It seems really straightforward but he really writes everything so that it isn't the action of the scene that is important, but the emotions of the characters that are most relevant. Here's a sample passage

"He sat silent in bitterness. At last the whole affair appeared in a cynical aspect to him. She had really played with him, not he with her. She had hidden all her condemnation from him, had flattered him, and despised him. She despised him now. He grew intellectual and cruel."

The second part of the book primarily focuses on the second son of the family, Paul, and his relationships with two women and his mother. It is during this part that I started to lose some interest. Basically for a good 300 pages Paul keeps switching back and forth between two women, neither of whom he seems to particularly love while his mother just criticizes his choices and tries to be the focus of his life. Paul's internal debate on whether or not he should marry one of the girls just seems endless... while the mother who is such a sympathetic character in the first part becomes totally obsessive of her son and really unlikable.

Overall I did like the book for its style and the setting was unique, though by the end I didn't really care for the main character. He just kept becoming more and more unlikable as the novel progressed. So it won't go into my top 50, but it'll get an A-.