Loathing Lawrence

Soon - next week, hopefully - I will be done with DH Lawrence and his pontificating about the ills of turn of the 20th century modernism.  Three tedious novels later, I offer this summary: 

Sons & Lovers:  464 pages of Oedipal Complex (supposedly, he was drawing on his own life, not Freud)

Rating:  4 out of 10:  The characters in the book are so lame, fatalist, and inconclusive in their thoughts that I felt like tossing the book out the window (which I did with a  book of similar lameness:  Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Too bad, because The Mayor Of Casterbridge was amazing) 

The Rainbow: 502 pages of how people confuse sex with marriage and love.  The second half of the book is devoted to protagonist, Ursula, who has epiphanies every other day - none of which have any lasting impact until she miscarries at the end of the novel. In no other novel have I seen the word hate used so frequently. It appears that there are two emotional states for Lawrence: hate and everything else..except sex.

Rating: 5 out of 10: (largely because  I really liked the character depth of Tom Brangwen).  The prose is schizophrenic; the narrated internal monologue is beyond annoying; the level of indecision of all the characters throughout the novel is maddening. Worst of all, one has to read the follow-on novel Women in Love to understand what The Rainbow was supposed to be about...other than one woman's rejection of God's Covenant in the Old Testament.  Please, create a new myth already....

Women in Love: reading it now. People certainly fall in love easily in this novel...but the question is what is love in the precarious paranoia of DH Lawrence's pen? 

Rating: 7 out of 10 largely because Lawrence finally stops being an experience-vampire and lets the characters' interactions speak for themselves.  The women are particularly annoying.  At least the relationship between the two male protagonists is interesting...so far.What is completely annoying is Lawrence the author trying to impress the reading public with his philosophy prowess, by putting his ideas into the mouths of his characters. Really, I don't care if you don't like the metaphysical philosophers, that you think Nietzsche had it right, and that you and Bertam Russell had a falling out. I like my philosophy in fiction to be delivered with more subtlety that via weighty dialogues that sound like a meeting of the minds in a coffee shop.