The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman
by John Fowles
read: approximately 1996
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I read surprisingly few of the Time 100 novels in school.  The French Lieutenant's Woman was required reading one summer, maybe before Junior year.  I remember quite a few things about it for how long ago that was.  I was sixteen or seventeen when I read it, so obviously the pretty graphic sex scene left a lasting impression.  It still seems kind weird that they had us read that for school.

The novel is also notable for the interjection of the narrator as a physical character fairly far into the book, and his role in sorting out multiple endings.  The book has kind of a "Schrodinger's Cat" ending to it, where Fowles writes two endings, leaving it up to a coin flip which one is actually last.  It sounds weird; it kind of is.  At the time I didn't ask questions like "Why did he decide to do that?  Was it a statement about the arbitrariness of fate and the role of chance in our lives?  Or was it a statement rebelling against the expectations that novel readers have that a book has an ending at all?"  At the time, it seemed like cleverness for its own sake.  I'm not sure I can rule that out fifteen years later, but I did like the book, and the fact that I remember this stuff at all speaks well of it.