Reading Roundup, April 2026
Apr. 28th, 2026 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoBoth of my reads from April were purchased during my vacation to the UK in March, from G. David Booksellers in Cambridge. It was such a lovely shop with a huge selection of used books of all sorts, including the fun-to-browse antiquities/collectibles section! These two were not from there, more standard three pound fare, but they were fun to purchase and lovely ways to celebrate a holiday. I’m also extremely proud of myself for buying both and then immediately reading them, you know? TBR: almost net zero. (I bought something else at Oxfam which I haven’t read yet and won’t start soon, haha.)
Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh
This was Evelyn Waugh’s first published novel, from 1928. It’s a class satire, very of its era, following the misadventures of Paul Pennyfeather who is sent down from Oxford for actions not his own fault, and it continues apace from there. Paul spends time at Oxford, teaching at a boys’ school, being idle rich, and in prison, before circling back to Oxford. He encounters a surprisingly-small cast of eccentric companions—as one of them later puts it, Paul is an essentially static personality who has been cast into the maelstrom of a more dynamic society.
I picked up this used copy because it was one of those nice old paperbacks with semi-matte covers. Physically, it was a joy to read, so I’m sad to say that it won’t be staying in my collection. This book is kind of bad! Actually, I found it bad in a very similar way to how I found David Lodge’s satires bad: full of bigotry-as-humor. I found myself wondering if Lodge had been a fan of Waugh, or if this is just the fate set for edgy satires as they age.
The book is rolling along fine before we’re introduced to the major problem-creator, Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde. She’s a widowed mother of one of Paul’s students, Peter, and she and other parents arrive at school for a sports day. Out of Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde’s Rolls Royce steps her boyfriend, a Black man, and the next chapter is filled with multiple slurs for Black people. If I had to describe my impression of Waugh’s goal for this, it is that he thought he was critiquing upper middle class racism—the slurs are in the mouths of characters, and the Black character is given intellectual interests and perfect manners. But, obviously, this falls apart in the hands of a white writer repeatedly using the N word.
I know from reading so very many books of this (and earlier!) eras that this level of blatant racism was neither ubiquitous nor unremarkable. So Waugh choosing to use a Black character’s very existence as an Incident, purely for satirizing the improbability and scandal of that existence in this setting, to enable the use of slurs by his characters, and then to discard the character and move on from him a chapter later, is remarkable and offensive even for 1928.
Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde doesn’t stop being the enabler of offensive satire there. As Paul gets closer to her, we discover that she runs brothels in South America—the source of her immense wealth—and traffics naïve young women into prostitution. Yes, just some light humor about human trafficking for a central conflict!
On balance, Lodge’s satires (especially Small World) were worse to read, simply because his misogyny intensely pervaded the entire novel, whereas Waugh’s bigotry is more localized at its extremes. But that’s hardly a recommendation. And our hapless, blameless Paul Pennyfeather, to whom bad things keep happening, isn’t the right lens for me to appreciate the satire. He only angers me when he absorbs the racist language of his peers, or fails to see the human trafficking that he’s helping to enable. Was Waugh’s writing witty or well-observed? Maybe. I don’t know, because I was distracted by the flaws. It was his first novel; maybe his future satires got better. Brideshead Revisited wasn’t like this. But, god, don’t bother with this one.
Women in Love, by D. H. Lawrence
Women in Love is one of D. H. Lawrence’s most acclaimed novels—and such was my reasoning to start with this one, among the various options. I picked up a nice 1930s copy when I saw it, because it had been on my TBR forever, and I vaguely remembered it as being called a queer novel—but how so, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps the titular women?
Not really. This novel tells the story of the two Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and their romances with two men, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, who are friends with one another. We get to know the social positions of the sisters versus those of their wealthier romantic interests, and follow the slow development of these relationships as they wind their way past social obstacles in the form of family and friends, culminating in one marriage and one death. The book occupies all four characters’ points of view at different times, so we get to see what love means for each of them, and how they hope their various relationships (romantic, sibling, friend) will develop.
Let me open into my opinion by stating that I struggled with Lawrence’s prose, which I found both florid and repetitive. The first is a matter of opinion, but the second is fact: he uses a rhetorical device wherein he repeats a distinctive word or phrase three times in a short span very often. It’s a matter of taste whether you like this, but it undeniably makes the writing more verbose, and the result is a quite long book for, essentially, the resolution of two romances happening simultaneously.
But prose issues aside, my greatest criticism is that I don’t find Lawrence’s character writing very convincing. See, the climax hinges on a murder of passion, which should be the culmination of the relationship preceding it. I see the series of scenes meant to lead us there for that character—most notably, one involving animal cruelty—but I also saw Lawrence failing to build up to prior explosive rages across multiple characters, and falling instead to hair-trigger tantrums which seemed to emerge from noninteraction or small talk. I guess what I’m trying to express is that Lawrence seemed to want violence and anger to drive his major conflicts and provoke narrative climaxes, in a way which felt almost gothic, but the surrounding novel was one of slower-moving conversations about philosophy or observations of provincial life. The effect is jarring and unformed.
What doesn’t help my read is that I was unimpressed by Ursula and Gudrun as characters. Despite the length of the book, I thought that they had relatively few good moments—much of the humor or insight or emotion goes to Rupert and Gerald, leaving the sisters mainly with ruminations on romance. Ursula, to me, is defined by her worrying about whether Rupert really loves her. (No—more on that later.) I think that a reader going in determined to focus on the Brangwen sisters would find plenty there, they’re not non-entities, but as a more passively receptive first-time reader my attention felt purposefully steered to Rupert and Gerald at most points. They, for example, get past lovers, named siblings with on-page relationships, and prior friends/social circles. Gudrun gets the implication of some of this and Ursula almost none, leaving their main non-romantic depth to come from just each other, squashing all the roles of sibling/friend history into just one person, who is also a primary character and thus depriving them of a supporting cast. And they have living parents and other siblings, and both have jobs, so this comparative dearth of history is noticeable.
The relationship between Rupert and Gerald is a high point. It’s genuinely gripping with no prior investment, in part because it is so blatantly queer—in a book examining the nature of love, Rupert and Gerald’s love for one another is absolutely not ignored, and is in fact centered to the degree that it’s the subject of the closing lines of the novel. They loved one another and they were attracted to one another. It isn’t consummated, but we’re effectively meant to understand that as tragic.
Their primary struggle in understanding themselves is one of langauge—seeking the right ways to convey to themselves, and others, what they want from a relationship. Their physical attraction to women, or at least their ability to have sex with women, seems to confuse them in pursuing this goal; sex scenes often come at moments of identity crisis, and physical intimacy with women is like a tool to reaffirm a conventional masculinity/straightness and rebuke the unformed queer identity that they struggle with. It is a striking depiction of compulsory heterosexuality with so many high and low moments of genuine pathos. I kept a digital copy of the book open alongside my physical copy to highlight all of the times that queerness appears as a spectre in this relationship, and I have easily 75 annotations. This is a very gay book. You can tell that Lawrence was deeply interested in these characters and in the question of how to reconcile gay male attraction within a heterosexual social framework. He writes compellingly about it, even if I dislike the style of his prose and his indulgence in misplaced sensational scenes. But it’s a shame that it came in a novel about two sisters called “Women in Love”!
I’m glad that I read this book and I would recommend it. D. H. Lawrence is a huge figure in early 20th century British lit, someone discussed by Woolf and Forster as a contemporary. His books were also famously banned as obscene, and it’s worth reading them to see the sex scenes in all of their euphemistic glory. Personally, I’m not convinced that it’s worth my time to try a second novel of his, but it was definitely worth my time to have read the first.
Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh
This was Evelyn Waugh’s first published novel, from 1928. It’s a class satire, very of its era, following the misadventures of Paul Pennyfeather who is sent down from Oxford for actions not his own fault, and it continues apace from there. Paul spends time at Oxford, teaching at a boys’ school, being idle rich, and in prison, before circling back to Oxford. He encounters a surprisingly-small cast of eccentric companions—as one of them later puts it, Paul is an essentially static personality who has been cast into the maelstrom of a more dynamic society.
I picked up this used copy because it was one of those nice old paperbacks with semi-matte covers. Physically, it was a joy to read, so I’m sad to say that it won’t be staying in my collection. This book is kind of bad! Actually, I found it bad in a very similar way to how I found David Lodge’s satires bad: full of bigotry-as-humor. I found myself wondering if Lodge had been a fan of Waugh, or if this is just the fate set for edgy satires as they age.
The book is rolling along fine before we’re introduced to the major problem-creator, Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde. She’s a widowed mother of one of Paul’s students, Peter, and she and other parents arrive at school for a sports day. Out of Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde’s Rolls Royce steps her boyfriend, a Black man, and the next chapter is filled with multiple slurs for Black people. If I had to describe my impression of Waugh’s goal for this, it is that he thought he was critiquing upper middle class racism—the slurs are in the mouths of characters, and the Black character is given intellectual interests and perfect manners. But, obviously, this falls apart in the hands of a white writer repeatedly using the N word.
I know from reading so very many books of this (and earlier!) eras that this level of blatant racism was neither ubiquitous nor unremarkable. So Waugh choosing to use a Black character’s very existence as an Incident, purely for satirizing the improbability and scandal of that existence in this setting, to enable the use of slurs by his characters, and then to discard the character and move on from him a chapter later, is remarkable and offensive even for 1928.
Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde doesn’t stop being the enabler of offensive satire there. As Paul gets closer to her, we discover that she runs brothels in South America—the source of her immense wealth—and traffics naïve young women into prostitution. Yes, just some light humor about human trafficking for a central conflict!
On balance, Lodge’s satires (especially Small World) were worse to read, simply because his misogyny intensely pervaded the entire novel, whereas Waugh’s bigotry is more localized at its extremes. But that’s hardly a recommendation. And our hapless, blameless Paul Pennyfeather, to whom bad things keep happening, isn’t the right lens for me to appreciate the satire. He only angers me when he absorbs the racist language of his peers, or fails to see the human trafficking that he’s helping to enable. Was Waugh’s writing witty or well-observed? Maybe. I don’t know, because I was distracted by the flaws. It was his first novel; maybe his future satires got better. Brideshead Revisited wasn’t like this. But, god, don’t bother with this one.
Women in Love, by D. H. Lawrence
Women in Love is one of D. H. Lawrence’s most acclaimed novels—and such was my reasoning to start with this one, among the various options. I picked up a nice 1930s copy when I saw it, because it had been on my TBR forever, and I vaguely remembered it as being called a queer novel—but how so, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps the titular women?
Not really. This novel tells the story of the two Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and their romances with two men, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, who are friends with one another. We get to know the social positions of the sisters versus those of their wealthier romantic interests, and follow the slow development of these relationships as they wind their way past social obstacles in the form of family and friends, culminating in one marriage and one death. The book occupies all four characters’ points of view at different times, so we get to see what love means for each of them, and how they hope their various relationships (romantic, sibling, friend) will develop.
Let me open into my opinion by stating that I struggled with Lawrence’s prose, which I found both florid and repetitive. The first is a matter of opinion, but the second is fact: he uses a rhetorical device wherein he repeats a distinctive word or phrase three times in a short span very often. It’s a matter of taste whether you like this, but it undeniably makes the writing more verbose, and the result is a quite long book for, essentially, the resolution of two romances happening simultaneously.
Hermione roused herself as from a death—annihilation.
“He is such a dreadful satanist, isn’t he?” she drawled to Ursula, in a queer resonant voice, that ended on a shrill little laugh of pure ridicule. The two women were jeering at him, jeering him into nothingness. The laugh of the shrill, triumphant female sounded from Hermione, jeering him as if he were a neuter.
“No,” he said. “You are the real devil who won’t let life exist.”
She looked at him with a long, slow look, malevolent, supercilious.
“You know all about it, don’t you?” she said, with slow, cold, cunning mockery.
But prose issues aside, my greatest criticism is that I don’t find Lawrence’s character writing very convincing. See, the climax hinges on a murder of passion, which should be the culmination of the relationship preceding it. I see the series of scenes meant to lead us there for that character—most notably, one involving animal cruelty—but I also saw Lawrence failing to build up to prior explosive rages across multiple characters, and falling instead to hair-trigger tantrums which seemed to emerge from noninteraction or small talk. I guess what I’m trying to express is that Lawrence seemed to want violence and anger to drive his major conflicts and provoke narrative climaxes, in a way which felt almost gothic, but the surrounding novel was one of slower-moving conversations about philosophy or observations of provincial life. The effect is jarring and unformed.
What doesn’t help my read is that I was unimpressed by Ursula and Gudrun as characters. Despite the length of the book, I thought that they had relatively few good moments—much of the humor or insight or emotion goes to Rupert and Gerald, leaving the sisters mainly with ruminations on romance. Ursula, to me, is defined by her worrying about whether Rupert really loves her. (No—more on that later.) I think that a reader going in determined to focus on the Brangwen sisters would find plenty there, they’re not non-entities, but as a more passively receptive first-time reader my attention felt purposefully steered to Rupert and Gerald at most points. They, for example, get past lovers, named siblings with on-page relationships, and prior friends/social circles. Gudrun gets the implication of some of this and Ursula almost none, leaving their main non-romantic depth to come from just each other, squashing all the roles of sibling/friend history into just one person, who is also a primary character and thus depriving them of a supporting cast. And they have living parents and other siblings, and both have jobs, so this comparative dearth of history is noticeable.
The relationship between Rupert and Gerald is a high point. It’s genuinely gripping with no prior investment, in part because it is so blatantly queer—in a book examining the nature of love, Rupert and Gerald’s love for one another is absolutely not ignored, and is in fact centered to the degree that it’s the subject of the closing lines of the novel. They loved one another and they were attracted to one another. It isn’t consummated, but we’re effectively meant to understand that as tragic.
Quite other things were going through Birkin’s mind. Suddenly he saw himself confronted with another problem—the problem of love and eternal conjunction between two men. Of course this was necessary—it had been a necessity inside himself all his life—to love a man purely and fully. Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it.
Their primary struggle in understanding themselves is one of langauge—seeking the right ways to convey to themselves, and others, what they want from a relationship. Their physical attraction to women, or at least their ability to have sex with women, seems to confuse them in pursuing this goal; sex scenes often come at moments of identity crisis, and physical intimacy with women is like a tool to reaffirm a conventional masculinity/straightness and rebuke the unformed queer identity that they struggle with. It is a striking depiction of compulsory heterosexuality with so many high and low moments of genuine pathos. I kept a digital copy of the book open alongside my physical copy to highlight all of the times that queerness appears as a spectre in this relationship, and I have easily 75 annotations. This is a very gay book. You can tell that Lawrence was deeply interested in these characters and in the question of how to reconcile gay male attraction within a heterosexual social framework. He writes compellingly about it, even if I dislike the style of his prose and his indulgence in misplaced sensational scenes. But it’s a shame that it came in a novel about two sisters called “Women in Love”!
I’m glad that I read this book and I would recommend it. D. H. Lawrence is a huge figure in early 20th century British lit, someone discussed by Woolf and Forster as a contemporary. His books were also famously banned as obscene, and it’s worth reading them to see the sex scenes in all of their euphemistic glory. Personally, I’m not convinced that it’s worth my time to try a second novel of his, but it was definitely worth my time to have read the first.
