[G] can be quite sententious, and there is some fine writing here which creates doubts: what does it mean to credit someone with absolute desires who has been declared to be without needs? What does it mean to say that his desires are not rooted in him, as are those of the other men mentioned? But the general picture is clear enough.

If G. is God's gift to women, it's a gift that is rapidly removed from each in turn, though these lightning departures do not spoil the miraculous cures. His departures resemble those of the traditional Don Juan….

If G. is a sexual revolutionary who is also a social revolutionary, his subversions and his seductions are seldom seen to coincide. Not only that, the healing effects of his seductions are largely a matter of assertion on the writer's part…. At times, the author of this book reads like an involuntary male chauvinist who is on the side of Women's Liberation because he is on the side of revolution….

The book has an interest, however, which can't be argued away like this. It was a good idea to bring together the roles of seducer and subversive during a period when there seems to have been a powerful relationship between greed for money and the glorification of adultery: a powerful relationship, both of attraction and revulsion, between business killings and lady-killings. G. isn't exactly a person: he is mythical and anonymous, and a striking last passage compares his death to the lapsing of a wave in a tossing sea of human experience. But in so far as he is a person, he is, somehow, a plausible one, and the career of this uprooted Anglo-Italian bastard gent, devoted to sex and social outrage, may be felt to represent a likely story.

For all that, there is oddly little sense of period in the book, and this may possibly be related to the lack of any element of enjoyment, affection, or humor in G.'s love affairs. The very riots are sexier: in fact, it is the riots that are sexy. What humor there is is of the accidental kind….

But perhaps such a want of feeling and absence of atmosphere are not odd at all, but just what you'd expect from a novel which is an essay in the French style…. Some of the narratives and small items are very successful—the failing bond between G.'s parents, for instance, and the Chavez episode. But some of them are not. This isn't a tall story, but some of its explanations and assertions are (for me) quite tall…. Mr. Berger occasionally gives the impression of lecturing, and is self-confident about difficult matters. (p. 41)