America's literary intellectuals have reached a consensus. They've decided T. S. Eliot was wrong after all. Ours is not a culture of a thousand lost golf balls. It's a culture of a thousand lost chances for coitus, and our activist novelists hasten to close the copulation gap for us—at least imaginatively.

Thus R. V. Cassill conjures up a new hero for our time: Rodney Buckthorne, fraudulent professor of classics; charismatic pied-piper to hedonist youth; and seducer of perhaps all the women of New York City except those accidentally stuck in elevators or lost in the far-off Bronx. Cassill's fifth novel, "La Vie Passionnée of Rodney Buckthorne," jokes blackly through his 51-year-old hero's super-erotic passage to the last and ultimate copulation: sex with a dark lady as deadly as cancer. If genital gluttony doesn't pay, it's nevertheless the fun way to go, says Cassill….

Because Cassill has always weighted his writing with gravity, one tends to look for a hard center in "La Vie Passionnée of Rodney Buckthorne." It's missing. Some targets—the inhuman use of human beings, the frauds of arty non-art, students' cannibalism of their teachers, the hopeless loopholes in the marriage contract, the insane community of foundations—he hits without letup.

But his attitude toward Buckthorne is at least ambivalent, at best troubled. Buckthorne believes it's the destiny of erotic man—and that's every man—to search for his certainties in "the magnetic field" of the vagina. The boy in Cassill thinks so, too. But another part of him—the thinking man—knows and finally shows such to be a scenario for disaster. As a consequence, the plot runs wild. Buckthorne has rubber for soul, Cassill's intent gets fogged, and the novel bursts with mirth and life.