This is the most boring, painful book I've ever read in my life, ever. ( )

921 Tono-Bungay, by H. G. Wells (read 5 Oct 1967) There is an article in Wikipedia on this book, which begins thusly
Tono-Bungay (1909), by H. G. Wells, is a realist semi-autobiographical novel. It is narrated by George Ponderevo, a science student who is drafted in to help with the promotion of Tono-Bungay, a harmful stimulant disguised as a miraculous cure-all, the creation of his ambitious uncle Edward. As the tonic prospers, George experiences a swift rise in social status, elevating him to riches and opportunities that he had never imagined, nor indeed desired.

I don't remember much from my reading of the book over 40 years ago, except I do recall I was not overly impressed by it. I do know that the reason I read it is that in my college English Lit book (The College Survey of Emglish Literature, Shorter Edition, 1947) on page 1261 it is listed in " Suggestions for Further Reading" as one of 16 novels--all of which I have read except The Water
Gypsies, by A. P. Herbert ( )

Henry James accused Wells and his fellow wriers, especially Bennett, and Galsworthy of artless writing: "they squeeze out to the utmost the plump and more or less juicy orange of a parricular aquainted state and let their affirmation of energy, however directed or undirected, constitute for them the treatment of the theme." James named it excessive exclusiveness - or saturation. "The more he knows and knows, or at any rate learns and learns, wrote James, "the greater our impresssion that he shall but turn out his mind and its contents upon us by any free familiar gesture as from a high window for ever open." Sounds like a scene from Monty Python. Wells fired back with this: that Jame's writing was compared to a magnificent but ungainly hippo resolved to at any cost, even the cost of his dignity, upon picking up a pea which it has got in the corner of its den. Wells apologized for his irreverence and referred to his own book in question as a "waste-paper basket."
Of course Wells was moving all this while towards a mor modern outlook. The main character in Tono-Bungay in the final section of this novel explains that he is attempting to render the messy totality of his life, and thus that both book and life will necessarily appear as Pastiche: "a succession of samples," something of am agglomeration," a hotch-potch."
In the end the critics call out Wells for his lack of style. Mark Shorer's 1948 essay, "Technique as Discovery" offered one of the earliest and most enduring critiques of Wells' stylistic shortcomings. For Shorer Wells "flounders through a series of literary imitations - from an early Dickensian, episode, through a kind of Shavian interlude, through a Conradian episode, to a Jules Verne vision at the end. The significant failure is in that end... As far as one can tell Wells intends no irony... The novel ends in a kind of meditative rhapsody which denies every value that the book has been aiming toward. For all the kinds of social waste which Wells has been describing, this is the most inclusive, the final waste."
We forgive Joyce for his use of parody, but not Wells. What, no irony? I've been infrequently disappointed by anything of Wells. Tono-Bungay is funny and about something important at its core. ( )

Gave up on this one two thirds of the way through. It is considerably longer than other Wells novels, and the central plot of the quack invention was too peripheral to sustain my interest among the meanderings of the narrator's life and loves. Disappointing. ( )