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The storyline is in the name, Sons and Lovers, but what you don't expect are the subtleties of the Oedipus complex or Freudian allegory. It was a surprisingly sensational read for me, especially since earlier this year, I gave myself a classics challenge: to read and re-read a few classics just for the sake of it; erase the disdain of forced-readings in high school, college and grad school; read just for how it makes me feel, not because everyone else is doing it. Sons and Lovers ends my personal challenge, the twentieth read and most likely the last classic I read in 2013. The best one I've read all year.

Here we have the Morel family. There is the miner who falls in love with the sophisticated woman and lies to her about his financial situation. They move to the Nottingham coalfields, get married and have children: three boys, one girl. The marriage is dreadful, dad is a drunk and abuser. Now fast forward to William, the oldest son who moves to London to live the cultured life. There he falls in love with a shallow girl who treats his working-class family like servants.

So starts the stories of the sons and their lovers: William, Paul, and Arthur--sons who all lead complicated love lives.

Victoria Blake wrote this in her introduction:
Though often these passages are annoyingly indistinct and, for all their spiritual beauty, difficult to get through, the reader remembers the sense of them years later. They stick to you, like pollen on a cheek, a sense of mystery, a sense of the wonderful and the unknown. It is this sense, frustratingly unnameble, that was Lawrence's genius and his legacy to letters.
The book has less to do with lovers, more to do with love--or the lack thereof. Or the expression of love. Most of the book centers around Paul Morel, the lover, the fool, the man with a strange love for his mother, the artist. His antagonizing relationship with his best friend Miriam, the woman who loves him wholeheartedly, but whom he can't seem to love. His tumultuous relationship with the married Claire. His ambivalent relationship with his father. His struggle with self-love. And then there is the mother. "And I shall never meet the right woman while you live," Paul tells his mother.

When Lawrence blurbed his book in 1912, this is how he described the sons and their relationship with their mother:
But as her sons grow up, she selects them as lovers--first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother...but when they come to manhood, they can't love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives...
Now, now, don't get all squeamish, for it is not that kind of read. There are subtleties though: a bedtime stroke of the eyebrows there, too long a hair rub here, mouth on throat...you know, those kinds of seemingly inappropriate gestures.

Lawrence is elegant in his descriptions: part-show, part-tell. Though as Blake mentions, there are times certain parts of the narrative are so subtle they seem elusive. Yet there are no complexities here. Just simple, elegant proffering, even at this moment in the book, where things stood still for me as he foreshadowed death: two people who knew that one of them was dying:
But he was white to the lips, and their eyes as they looked at each other understood. Her eyes were blue--such a wonderful forget-me-not blue! He felt as if only they had been of a different color he could have borne it better. His heart seemed to be ripping slowly in his breast. He kneeled there, holding her hand, and neither said anything.
Paul's relationship with Miriam was the page-turner for me. She wanted a partner, he felt stifled: "You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And I should die there smothered." Oh the unrequited love, always making for a good story.

Not surprisingly, the fictional relationship was said to be based off a true one with Lawrence and his long-time friend, Jessie Chambers, who even acted as an agent for him at one point, sending off his work to be published when he had given up. She too loved him and was stunned when he sent her the manuscript to this book. She read the book and they never spoke again. He went on to have a long-term tumultuous relationship. How's that for fiction? Now I really can't wait to read her biography: D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record.

The storytelling is swift yet very intimate, partly because of the omniscient narrator that Lawrence pulls off so seamlessly, at just the right moments, you know what everyone is thinking. Perhaps one of my favorite parts about the book is the riffing on language, the dialect in dialogue to produce sensational conversations where each character really stands out, because as Virginia Woolf said about him, D.H. Lawrence was "original." There were the words and phrases of a certain time and place that really intrigued me: "a mardy baby" instead of a spoiled baby; "you pair of gabeys" instead of you pair of fools; "what a bobby-dazzler!"

Now I can truly understand the fuss about the Lawrencian language, that language of elusion, symbolism and mysticism. The inconspicuous rearranging of words and sentence structuring here and there.

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