Point Counter Point [Paperback]

Two brothers-in-law, Walter Bidlake and Philip Quarles, are
clearly projections of Huxley at different ages. They
interact with each other and the other members of the large
cast of characters. A third, diabolical character, Maurice
Spandrell, is more or less Huxley's Jungian shadow. D.H.
Lawrence is projected into the story as Mark Rampion, and
John Middleton Murry appears as Denis Burlap. We are
allowed inside the minds of these five men, letting us see
the events of the story from many points of view. For that
matter, we are allowed inside the minds of all the
characters. In particular, we are allowed inside the mind
of the frighteningly seductive femme fatale, Lucy
Tantamount, who is a projection of Nancy Cunard.

Communists and Fascists, apolitical seekers of wholeness,
God-seekers, and bored aesthetes offer their views on the
events and ideas of the time and on each other. Sometimes
these oppositions escalate into violence. The crippling
effects of poverty on the poor are contrasted with the
pathetic efforts of their economic betters to come to terms
with their personal demons.

The young rich characters have for the most part dispensed
with God and busy themselves searching for a good time. But
the doddering rich, the elderly quietists, the weepy
inepts, the smarmy bullies, the shameless exploiters, and
the sinister diabolists continue the quest. The elderly
quietists come off best.

The lusts of the flesh fail as miserably as religion.
Philip Quarles and his wife cannot communicate. Spandrell
humiliates his conquests, but is ultimately bored with
them. Lucy Tantamount is also chronically unfulfilled.
Rampion's vision of wholeness and marital fulfillment
serves more to highlight the deficiencies of the other
characters than to inspire emulation. The elderly members
of the cast no longer possess the life force necessary to
seduce, and such efforts as they make end in disaster.
Burlap, the truly successful seducer of the novel, is so
disgusting that he will make your skin crawl.

The novel is like a machine with a thousand moving parts.
It delights, it captivates, it amuses and horrifies. It
sparkles with Huxley's intelligence and wit. It is
sufficiently vicious in spots to gratify one's intellectual
bloodlust. I enjoyed it.

But I kept going, for an as yet uncertain reason compelled to at least finish it. And nothing changes . . .

The turnaround comes in the slow, very subtle humanizing of these pompous jerks followed by a rapid and all-consuming anatomization of the nuance and flow of their personalities. Regardless of their lofty identities and superior postures, these people are flaked away, pulled apart, itemized and discarded with an ambitious and often roaring insight.

I suspect many of Huxley's other novels resemble this slow-to-appreciate mumble of ramblings, often in dispute, of various social issues as seen by people who hardly care. Having ventured this one I might wish to avoid many of the others. Regardless of this eventual respect I still find myself irritated. Call it three-and-a-half, rounded up because it ends rather cruelly.