Quite a good novel, it grows on you. Mournful in a subtle way, as it offers the impressions of an older man looking back on his life: processing his mistakes, his regrets, his what-ifs, his missed opportunities.
Sometimes a book finds you at just the right stage of life where it makes sense for you to read it. This book somehow found me at a stage of my life where I'm thinking through these things too, and it made for a disconcerting--and at times saddening--reading experience. Yet the book still engrossed me in a strange, captivating way.
Finally, a warning: This novel is not built for the attention span of the post-modern reader. You won't find gripping plot twists every twenty pages to hold your attention, and the pacing is stately, even slow. Note also that this is volume one of an eleven (!!) volume series, a gigantic fictional memoir spanning main character Lewis Eliot's life across much of the 20th century. This first volume deals with his childhood up to his first years establishing himself professionally, and his regret-filled embroilment in a relationship with what we'd call today a "Cluster B" woman.
Notes:
* The novel starts off with Lewis Eliot's childhood in the months leading up to World War I, and the author does a phenomenal job creating an atmosphere of palpable tension: the various characters can tell something is going to happen--something was about to happen somewhere--but they didn't know for sure where or what. It's reminiscent of the economic and geopolitical tension in the air right now in 2023.
* Lewis's father starts a business with money borrowed from family, it fails.
* "I expect big things from you, dear." Lewis's mother felt that she married beneath her station, believed she was destined for bigger and better things, and she made Lewis the (codependent) instrument of her hopes and dreams.
* Aunt Millie starts helping pay for things like Lewis's schooling. Lewis and his parents experiences the slow grind of growing poverty over the course of World War I.
* The "ten-shilling note in front of the class" scene: "It isn't the showy things that are most difficult to do, Eliot. It's just plodding away and doing your duty and never getting thanked for it--that's the test for bright lads like you. You just bear my words in mind."
* He meets George Passant as lecturer of an evening law class he takes. "Meeting George Passant was the first piece of pure chance which affected all that I did later."
* He gets a bad case of oneitis with Cluster-B girlfriend Sheila. She humiliates him by showing up at a party with another, older man, etc. It's his first true love, and it's an object example of the "never stick your dick in crazy" rule. He becomes her beta orbiter essentially, and they develop a strange codependence, revolving around each other, fucking with each other's minds, interfering in each other's lives, etc. She sucks the life out of him.
* There are some terrible sentences in here. "Mrs. Eden was kneeling on the hearthrug, busy with hieratic earnestness at the mixing of the punch." Nice nominalization, bro.
Vocabulary: [It's rare to find a book with this many new words, what a pleasure!!]
Gnomic: pithy, aphoristic
Heiratic: priestly, serious like a priest
Schwarmerei: ardent and lively interest or eagerness. 2. an object of keen interest; passion.
Badinage: witty conversation.
Home truth: an unpleasant fact about oneself, especially as pointed out by another person
Sunket: a delicacy in food (such as a fancy cake or tart)
Climacteric: a critical period or event. Or, in adjectival form, having extreme and far-reaching implications or results; critical.
Matily: in a familiar and friendly manner. ("He talked matily.")
Guying: making fun of; ridiculing.
Subfusc: dull, gloomy
Ponce: pimp; a man who lives off a prostitute's earnings.
Revenant: a person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead (from the French verb: revenir)
Flocculent: having or resembling tufts of wool ("the first snows of winter lay thick and flocculent"); having a loosely clumped texture ("a brown flocculent precipitate").
Percipience: good understanding of things; perceptiveness
Irremediable: impossible to cure or put right ("irremediable marital breakdowns").
Burke: to suppress quietly or indirectly. To bypass, avoid ("I didn't burke the truth").