" The edition I read had some critical commentary in the frontmatter. In one case, someone or other was quoted as having said this book should have been called "Everyone In Hate". That's only the beginning of the story: everyone is completely, irrationally hateful, spiteful, and petty at times, especially the women -- including the painfully incomprehensible act of attempted murder with a paperweight over a shockingly mild disagreement about the meaning of a probably meaningless painting of a duck, compounded by the victim's later conclusion that he deserved the unprovoked attack, which in a better writer's work might have been attributed to the severe concussion he received. Meanwhile, the attention on the manly physiques of the heroic male characters was absurd in its poorly suppressed and utterly gratuitous lasciviousness, while the fatuous, excrutiating attention to irrelevant details (such as the comically out of place page and a half devoted to the yellow dress worn by one of the key female characters in the midst of what could have been a tragic incident involving a boy's untimely demise) boggled the mind.
One could easily be forgiven for coming away from this book with the idea that its author was a misogynistic, cowardly, loathesomely passive-aggressive man who lashed out at everyone who did not regard him with stars in their eyes through the pathetic mechanism of turning them into comically vile people in his writing, his view of the world twisted by his inability to reconcile his latent (but obviously emerging) homesexuality with his cultural indoctrination. In fact, if one was to then go on to read about Lawrence's life at the time he wrote the book, one's ideas to that effect would be fully justified. The asinine double-helping of teenage angst behind Lawrence's piss-poor writing might be forgivable if he was not about twice the age normal for that kind of self-pitying pathos. I'm convinced the only reason this overwrought, overvalued, overlong bundle of kindling is regarded as a "classic" is its controversy at the time it was published and the fact it is a relatively early indicator of the way repressed sexual deviations from the norms of the time found outlet in what we might call "the arts" for lack of a better, less flattering term for this novel. "
— Chad, 2/14/2014