If I didn't have to read this for a class, I probably wouldn't have finished it. A friend of mine put it perfectly when she said, "Every time I pick up this book and read a little, I want to throw it against the wall." That pretty much sums it up. Lawrence's hero, Birkin, is about as irritating as a man can be. When he gets clobbered over the head with the paperweight, I wished it was me doing the clobbering. (I doubt I'm spoiling anything, because most people probably shouldn't read it, and if you do, you'll probably agree.)

I did end up loving it in the end. I have no idea why. Birkin is a shit, almost every line he has in the book is lifted from Freud or Baudelaire. His buddy Gerald is worse, a privileged heir to a coal mining fortune. Where Birkin moralizes, Gerald is amoral. The women are practically absent, even though this is their sequel and the title makes one think, "Hey, this'll be about women in love." It's not. It's about two men who are in love and the women who tolerate them.

Possibly, I loved this book because it is a fairly effective parody of British society romances, such as Pride and Prejudice. I don't know. Maybe it's because I love to hate the Modernist movement, and this is possibly the apex of British Modernism.