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Title: Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley ISBN: 1-56478-131-3 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr Pub. Date: October, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.22 (18 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Not a masterpiece, but still worth a read.
Comment: The book has its quirks that make it more difficult to read now than it might have been in 1928. The proportion of dialogue to plot movement makes the book's structure look like an extended parlor discussion with only a few events that "happen to them" in between. The book is also stuffed to the limit with exposition on the nearly dozen main characters, each of whose primary flaw is both explained in narrative and demonstrated not in action, but in dialogue. Third, the details of 1920s British politics and the scholarly dialogue make some parts difficult to follow, to the point of obscurity.
However, these flaws do not outweigh the sparkling portions of the book. If Huxley's dissection of the modern soul weren't so witheringly accurate and complete, this book might not have made mention outside its immediate time and place. Although this is from late in the book (Chapter 36), this passage (a journal entry in Philip Quarles' notebook) gives the summary statement of the problem:
"It's incomparably easier to know a lot, say, about the history of art and to have profound ideas about metaphysics and sociology than to know personally and intuitively a lot about one's fellows, one's wife and children. Living's much more difficult than Sanskrit or chemistry or economics. The intellectual life is child's play; which is why intellectuals tend to become children -- and then imbeciles and finally, as the political and industrial history of the last few centuries clearly demonstrates, homicidal lunatics and wild beasts. The repressed functions don't die; they deteriorate, they fester, they revert to primitiveness. But meanwhile it's much easier to be an intellectual child or lunatic or beast than a harmonious adult man."
Huxley demonstrates this general principle in his characters, all of whom are intellectuals of the moment and are engaged in fields of painting, writing, biology, politics, religion, and seduction, and all of whom share neither the solution to the unhappiness of their predicament, or the moral strength to overcome their weaknesses. This is a morality play, but not of the traditional kind. Here, the tempter is not a horned figure with a pitchfork. Rather, it is a consequence of the modern world: the balkanization of the fields of knowledge and the allure of "whoring after abstractions" at the expense of arresting the development of real human qualities. To this extent, I don't believe this problem has been solved even with the transition forward from the modern world into a post-modern one, and the character studies still largely ring true today.
That's not to say that today's moralists would agree to Huxley's solution to this problem. Rampion, the least flawed character in the book, says this as a rebuke to the religious ascetics and to the sexual and intellectual fetishists alike: "[I]t's a damned sight better to behave like a beast -- a real, genuine, undomesticated animal, I mean -- than to invent a devil and then behave like one's invention." Judging by how Huxley spent his life thereafter, it appears that this was his own view as well.
Rating: 5
Summary: 200 pages and counting
Comment: I'm roughly two hundred pages into this work and can't put it down. While other books have fallen by the wayside temporarily this book is so easily consumed. The book's character development is a joy thus far. Be warned, Brave New World is nothing like this work, so if you are looking for something similar, click on the G. Orwell link at the bottom of this page.
Rating: 4
Summary: a pompous and irritating book that somehow draws you in
Comment: After 100 pages I hated Point Counter Point. It was pretty nicely written, witty and urbane and filled with mildly amusing ponderings of people who like to show off how smart they imagine themselves to be. After the first 100 pages my vague recollection of reading Brave New World sometime years and years ago made my already underwhelming opinion nosedive. I hated the characters: hated their smug, self-righteous, utterly condescending self-importance and I was annoyed with Huxley for creating them.
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.
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Title: Crome Yellow (Coleman Dowell British Literature Series) by Aldous Huxley, Michael Dirda ISBN: 1564783049 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr Pub. Date: October, 2001 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley ISBN: 1566630185 Publisher: Ivan R Dee, Inc. Pub. Date: March, 1993 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Island by Aldous Huxley ISBN: 0060085495 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: August, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Antic Hay (Coleman Dowell British Literature Series) by Aldous Huxley ISBN: 1564781496 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr Pub. Date: April, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.50 |
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Title: Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley ISBN: 0929587782 Publisher: Ivan R Dee, Inc. Pub. Date: September, 1992 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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