Point Counter Point

Description

The dilettantes who frequent Lady Tantamount's society parties are determined to push forward the moral frontiers of the age. Marjorie has left her family to live with Walter; Walter is in love with the luscious but cold-hearted Lucy who devours every man in sight; the repulsive Spandrell deflowers young girls for the sake of entertainment and all the while everyone is engaged in dazzling and witty conversation. Often described as a Vanity Fair for the Twenties, Point Counter Point contains wickedly accurate portraits of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Ottoline Morrell and Huxley himself.

Aldous Huxley came to literary fame in 1921 with his first novel, Crome Yellow. With the novels Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves and Point Counter Point, Huxley quickly established a reputation for bright, brilliant satires that ruthlessly passed judgement on the shortcomings of contemporary society. In later life, exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs dominated Huxley's writing, including his first-person account of experiencing mescaline in The Doors of Perception. Aldous Huxley died in 1963.

Huxley's style is at once dry and rich, intellectual and sensuous, scholarly and romantic. Point Counter Point is extremely funny with passages of rich and gorgeous farce * Observer * As a piece of satire, often brilliant, sometimes wise, Point Counter Point is a monstrous exposure of a society which confuses pleasure with happiness, sensation with sensibility, mood with opinion, opinion with conviction and self with God * Guardian *