2005-06-14 - 2:01 a.m. - Antic Hay, by Aldous Huxley
This was great. It bogs down, rarely, when lingering too long on a particular uncomfortable situation. But on the overall, it sparkles, presenting a witty but still insightful (and incisive) satire of middle-class pseudo-bohemian life. Like Sinclair Lewis's roughly contemporary Babbitt, which I read last month, it sometimes hits a little too close to home, which is probably the mark of a book one is in the long term glad to have read. I especially appreciated the struggling artist who puts more energy into convincing himself that he has a rare passion and spirit for art than he does into actually maintaining that passion. But there are others to appreciate, mainly lead Theodore Gumbril, whose plan to market trousers with an inflatable seat (for sitting on hard benches) seems almost completely sidelined by his schemes to come across as a sophisticated, devilishly bon-mot-dropping young man about town. The scene where he first transforms into the "Complete Man" by donning a mail-order beard was pure gold.
In addition to Babbitt this book is also a contemporary of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and there are some similarities to that book as well. There is a clear kinship, first of all, between Clarissa Dalloway and Huxley's Mrs. Viveash - both prospering socialites gnawed by nostalgia and a sense of weary aimlessness. Huxley was also exploring some of the same techniques as Woolf in terms of storytelling - there's not much of an overall plot, and while Gumbril is the most clearly-drawn character, he's not really more central than anybody else. The action tends to wander from one character to the next as they encounter each other - e.g., we follow Gumbril as he approaches an art opening, and then at the art opening we briefly linger on a buzzword-dropping gallery assistant before focusing on the artist himself, with whom we leave the scene, etc. There's nothing to rival the effortlessly cinematic swoops of Mrs. Dalloway (particularly its opening sequence, in which eyes gazing at a patch of skywritten advertising move us from character to character across central London in less words than it took me to explain this), and Huxley doesn't achieve the same thematic heights or depth of character that Woolf did. Of course, he wasn't trying to. As a light, dialogue-heavy satire, this unquestionably succeeds.