TURN-ONS AND TURN-OFFS IN CURRENT HOME ENTERTAINMENT RELEASES : Excellent Good Fair Poor : AUDIOCASSETTES

“The Good Soldier.” Recorded Books. (Unabridged: five cassettes). Ford Madox Ford’s 1927 novel relentlessly analyzes lives among the rich and obscure in England and Europe on the eve of World War I, and by its very relentlessness finally makes unattractive characters interesting. Frank Muller’s reading catches the diffident, faintly epicene personality of the narrator, an expatriate Philadelphian, who tells of his deceitful American wife (who feigns illness), their deceitful English friends, the Ashburnhams (Edward Ashburnham is the good soldier), and the convent-bred girl whose innocent beauty precipitates the last, curiously unmoving tragedy. A minor piece of literary history, owing more to James and Wharton than to Ford’s post-Freudian contemporaries. Information: (800) 638-1304.