The notes at the back looking as long as a book, and the book at the front looming as big as a house, Mr. Mizener’s new opus, The Saddest Story, the story of Ford Madox Ford, is to be approached with a trepidation only slightly eased by the fact that we are here plainly in the tradition of one-volume giganticism exemplified by Mark Schorer (on Sinclair Lewis), rather than the tradition of multivolume elephantiasis exemplified by George Painter (on Proust) and Leon Edel (on Henry James). As it turns out, the span of the average train strike is just sufficient to get the book read. This feat accomplished, the immediate temptation is to hail a masterpiece. The Saddest Story is in fact something less than that, but it is still very good.