SOURCE: "Parade's End," in The Life and Work of Ford Madox Ford, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965, pp. 170-90.

An American author and educator whose publications include well-received biographies of Ford, Raymond Chandler, James Jones, and John O'Hara, MacShane has specialized in studies of the so-called "stepchildren of literature. "MacShane's works combine narrative and critical insight in an effort to rescue some relatively forgotten authors from what he considers their undeserved obscurity. In the following excerpt, he examines form and technique in Parade's End.

Parade's End is an immensely suggestive panoramic novel that at the same time provides a profound psychological analysis of a small number of human beings. Superficially, it has much in common with Vanity Fair and, in so far as it presents a study of the war between the sexes against a background of rising and falling social classes, it resembles Proust's A la Recherche du Temps...