Review: Point Counter Point

Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I bought his paperback in 1995, coming off the high of Brave New World. I haven't read it yet because, well, I just am not drawn to fiction that much. But, it is Huxley and after all I was pleased with Crome Yellow. On top of that, in 1998, the Modern Library ranked this 44th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Still, after a couple hundred pages into this tome I was really pushing myself following the interlinked storylines such as young journalist Walter Bidlake living with Marjorie Carling, a married woman whose husband refuses to grant her a divorce. Marjorie is pregnant with Walter's child, but their relationship is disintegrating, largely because Walter has fallen desperately in love with the sexually aggressive and independent Lucy Tantamount...

Is this a soap opera? I rarely enjoy stories and movies about people who seems to have no daily obligations and just flop about acting out their character defects.

Well, so Tantamount is based on Nancy Cunard with whom Huxley had a similarly unsatisfactory affair. I have heard that among the recurring themes (as in musical "counterpoint"), we have many autobiographical passages like Everard Webley, a political demagogue and leader of his own quasi-military group often assumed to be based on Oswald Mosley, and Mark Rampion, a writer and painter based on D. H. Lawrence whom Huxley admired greatly, etc. That wasn't sustaining me -- and it often doesn't. How do I know what is true? I liked more the frequent references to other books, adding to my to-read list.

There is a pay-off at the end, of sorts with murder and some sort of suffering child, I guess gnashing its teeth over some adult sour grapes. Some sort of exorcism; catharsis?

Interesting if not fascinating two-dimensional people spewing thoughts on love, religion, science, politics, etc.

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