Book review: Lady Chatterley's Lover

[gfish]

This was a confusing book. It started very strong, with some really interesting and subtle characterizations. A good sense of interiority for the main character. But as the book goes on, everyone becomes more and more of a caricature. The middle third is full of smut that ends up getting fairly tedious, though I'm sure it was very shocking in its day. It has the dubious honor of containing the earliest example of male-author-writing-a-woman-examining-herself-naked-in-a-mirror scene I'm aware of. By the end of the books, everyone has switched to endless speechifying about how terrible industrialized society is, like an Ayn Rand book obsessed with the aesthetics -- and definitely nothing deeper -- of English life.

I did like the ambiguity of the ending, though.