Huxley, Aldous (Vol. 3) | Huxley, Aldous 1894–1963
Huxley, Aldous 1894–1963
A British-American novelist, essayist, poet, and playwright, Huxley earned his early reputation as a brilliant satirist. Vaguely optimistic and witty in his early novels, Huxley used his intellectual and sermonizing later novels to vent his increasing disgust with contemporary society. Critics often contend that his novels are not fiction at all, but fictionalized essays.
Point Counter Point is supposed to be the ruthless, not to say scientific, anatomizing of Huxley's world. Its fundamental artistic weakness is that that world as a living organism never comes into existence. It is as though Huxley is so keen to dissect that he cannot first take the trouble to create. His novel entirely lacks the sense of what makes the wheels go round in life. Even more than in the novels of his spiritual (and technical) successor, Jean-Paul Sartre, life is replaced by parasitism, a state of affairs tolerable only if the author is...
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