I can't believe it, but I read all the way through Women in Love, by D. H. Lawrence. Anyone who knows anything about this book will wonder why I did; anyone who doesn't know it may also wonder why I did. I blame the sexy blurbs inside the cover.

Some contemporaneous novels had worked well for me recently. I'd read Howards End, you know, and there was scarcely a dull or a false note in it.

Sadly, Women in Love is 450 pages of steak, nearly all fat. It's a shame: it has good themes. There's a tension between a very idealistic, but nihilistic, young man, Birkin, and a more practical industrialist, Crich; between the mannered social status quo and an impulse to be direct, spontaneous, and close to nature. There's a great scene where the boys visit London and have a nice night out with some flappers. He's pushing hard for libertinism, and that's appreciated. These themes are quite familiar since the 60s, at least, but the context of Georgian England puts a different (less acid-stained) color on them.

But, in this instance, he can't write for beans. He slathers so many adjectives onto his characters, and almost none stick. He's pushing them to feel things, to emote, but it doesn't work; I always wonder what the adjectives are trying to convey: "Gerald's eyes became hard and strange." What? "She greeted him with a mocking, enigmatic smile in which was a poignant gaiety." How now?

Over and over, too, the themes are treated in the narrator's own omniscient voice, which makes them clear but dull to follow. Here's a good one:

Suddenly he had conceived the pure instrumentality of mankind. There had been so much humanitarianism, so much talk of sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions, like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well?"

These musings can be interesting, but no more compelling (rather less) in an Georgian novel than in a Times op-ed. Drama must persuade through character, situation, and action, not through authorial statement.

If Women in Love tempts you, too, resist.