[.ca] Point Counter Point (ISBN 0099458195)

From Amazon.com:
When it was published in 1928, Point Counter Point no doubt shocked its readers with frank depictions of infidelity, sexuality, and the highbrow high jinks of Aldous Huxley's arty characters. What's truly remarkable, however, is how his novel continues to shock today. True, we may hardly lift an eyebrow at poor Marjorie Carling leaving her husband to live in sin with--and get pregnant by--her lover Walter Bidlake. And the sexual exploits of Lady Edward Tantamount or her daughter, Lucy, seem quite in keeping with the behavior expected of such exalted persons by readers inured to the exploits of the British Royals. If the varieties of sexual experience on display in Huxley's novel seem tame by current standards, his clear-eyed dissection of the motives behind them are thrillingly fresh--and his commentaries on everything from politics to ecology sometimes chillingly prescient. Take for example, the wisdom of amateur biologist Lord Edward Tantamount on the subject of non-renewable resources: "No doubt," he said, "you think you can make good the loss with phosphate rocks. But what'll you do when the deposits are exhausted?" He poked Everard in the shirt front. "What then? Only two hundred years and they'll be finished. You think we're being progressive because we're living on our capital Phosphates, coal, petroleum, nitre--squander them all. That's your policy. And meanwhile you go round trying to make our flesh creep with talk about revolutions." When his interlocutor, the fascist politician Everard Webley, demands to know whether Lord Edward wants a revolution, Tantamount first asks whether such an event would reduce the population and check production and then, when assured it would, he responds, "'Then certainly I want a revolution.' The Old Man thought in terms of geology and was not afraid of logical conclusions." Huxley fills his novel with a multitude of characters, from the obscenely wealthy Tantamounts to the priapic painter John Bidlake, his children Walter and Elinor, and their respective mates, Marjorie Carling and Philip Quarles. There is also the venomous Maurice Spandrell, the revolutionary Illidge, the unctuous Burlap, and the happily married (a rarity in this novel) Mark and Mary Rampion, who are the book's moral center--theirs is the one relationship that combines reason and passion in proper measure. They are purportedly in part based on well-known figures of the time such as D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. Love, loss, infidelity, and murder are the subjects under discussion as Huxley juxtaposes one point of view against its opposite, and mixes in a healthy dollop of science, politics, religion, and art, as well. Point Counter Point is an intelligent novel about the intellectual world, and one that bears up gracefully under the test of time. --Alix Wilber

points about Point Counterpoint:
This striking portrait of early 20th century high society is the first book I read by Aldous Huxley. While exposing the lavish lifestyle of the literary and social elite as one of hypocracy and shared animosity, it also carries a strong philisophical undercurrent. He uses the satirical charaterizations to expound on his personal docterine, and does so in a way that is both accessable and entertaining. At times the book tended to be a tad meandering, without any real plot-driving focus of conflict, but somehow the lack of a linear plot deveopment is not that big of an issue once you get caught up in the flow of his writing style. I do caution readers to avoid the foreward, as it reveals one of the few major plot developments. This is one of my all time favorite novels, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys biting satire, brilliant dialogue, and discourses on a variety of subjects that are still applicable nearly a century later. And how can one resist a book that fits in the phrase "the stertorous borborygmy of dispepsia"?

a pompous and irritating book that somehow draws you in:
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.

Interesting but not engaging:
The novel looks at more priveleged members of English society. Often, Huxley deals with their relationships and ponderings of the impact of scientific developments on society. Much of this is done well. However, the book is not one that engrosses the reader. The book was a chore to finish. Despite having some interesting personality traits and views, I found the characters mostly boring. The characters seemed to lack vitality. Is that a characteristic of the portion of society of which Huxley wrote?

Britain in the late '20s, with a dash of bitters:
Aldous Huxley's reputation as a writer of fiction rests on three works: _Antic Hay_, _Brave New World_, and _Point Counter Point_. In this book, the most ambitious and successful of the three, he examines in detail the ideas and personalities of the British intelligentsia of the late twenties. Their politics, their sexuality, their world view, their love of life, and their fear of death are ruthlessly dissected for our delectation. Huxley accomplishes this by developing various themes with one group of characters and then reintroducing them with another group, whose members view similar developments from a different perspective. Situations, ideas, and figures of speech recur in altered form throughout the novel. Oftentimes, he accomplishes this effect with a great deal of gentleness and subtlety. Two brothers-in-law, Walter Bidlake and Philip Quarles, are clearly projections of Huxley at different ages. They interact with each other and the other members of the large cast of characters. A third, diabolical character, Maurice Spandrell, is more or less Huxley's Jungian shadow. D.H. Lawrence is projected into the story as Mark Rampion, and John Middleton Murry appears as Denis Burlap. We are allowed inside the minds of these five men, letting us see the events of the story from many points of view. For that matter, we are allowed inside the minds of all the characters. In particular, we are allowed inside the mind of the frighteningly seductive femme fatale, Lucy Tantamount, who is a projection of Nancy Cunard. Communists and Fascists, apolitical seekers of wholeness, God-seekers, and bored aesthetes offer their views on the events and ideas of the time and on each other. Sometimes these oppositions escalate into violence. The crippling effects of poverty on the poor are contrasted with the pathetic efforts of their economic betters to come to terms with their personal demons. The young rich characters have for the most part dispensed with God and busy themselves searching for a good time. But the doddering rich, the elderly quietists, the weepy inepts, the smarmy bullies, the shameless exploiters, and the sinister diabolists continue the quest. The elderly quietists come off best. The lusts of the flesh fail as miserably as religion. Philip Quarles and his wife cannot communicate. Spandrell humiliates his conquests, but is ultimately bored with them. Lucy Tantamount is also chronically unfulfilled. Rampion's vision of wholeness and marital fulfillment serves more to highlight the deficiencies of the other characters than to inspire emulation. The elderly members of the cast no longer possess the life force necessary to seduce, and such efforts as they make end in disaster. Burlap, the truly successful seducer of the novel, is so disgusting that he will make your skin crawl. The novel is like a machine with a thousand moving parts. It delights, it captivates, it amuses and horrifies. It sparkles with Huxley's intelligence and wit. It is sufficiently vicious in spots to gratify one's intellectual bloodlust. I enjoyed it.

Brilliant, if slow moving:
Though the book takes it's sweet time in making it's points, in the end the payoff is well worth it. You realize that everyone in the book indeed is in one way or another a total jerk, and then the scary thing is when you realize you, and everyone you know, is somehow like any number of the characters. Great debate within over the struggle between passion and reason, hedonism and cold pursuit of "progress" or "The better good". The book may seem slow, but there is no other way the story, or points could have been effectively made.