Antic Hay

Aldous Huxley was the most able of satirists. . . and it is the essential seriousness of his mind, his real concern with the world which gives him his strength.The Nation Here is a sardonic, relentlessly outspoken novel of the sudden change of a mild, ineffective young man into a massive Rabelaisian man, broad and powerful and exuberant with vitality . . . great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover . . . Young Oxford tutor Theodore Gumbril has become thoroughly dismayed by the formality of college life and the staid British institutions of learning. An impetuous need for celebration, even rebellion, possesses him. He and his bohemian companions embark on wild and daring bacchanalian adventures that steer them resolutely away from stifling conventions of behavior. Antic Hay, first published in 1923, is one of Aldous Huxley’s earlier novels, and like them is primarily a novel of ideas involving conversations which disclose viewpoints rather than establish characters; its polemical theme unfolds against the backdrop of London’s post-war nihilistic Bohemia. This is Huxley at his biting, brilliant besta novel, loud with derisive laughter, which satirically scoffs at all conventional morality and at stuffy people everywherea novel that’s always charged with excitement. [A] . . . cry for madder music and for stronger wine . . .New York Times