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Antic Hay is one of Aldous Huxley's earlier novels, and like them is primarily a novel of ideas involving conversations that 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 best: a novel, loud with derisive laughter, which satirically scoffs at all conventional morality and at stuffy people everywhere, a novel that's always charged with excitement.
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Readers of Huxley's Brave New World will find glimmers of that book's dark humor and sterling powers of observation in this stellar 1923 lampoon of English intellectualism after WWI. Protagonist Theodore Gumbril Jr. teaches at an insignificant prep school for boys, work he pursues with little enthusiasm. "You weren't sufficiently interested in anything to want to devote yourself to it," his father says. "That was why you sought the last refuge of feeble minds." Gumbril performs scarcely better in a harebrained business venture, having quit his post and laid his hopes on making a fortune by selling "trousers with pneumatic seats," an idea that came to him while sitting on the school chapel's uncomfortable pews. What ensues is an uproarious kaleidoscope of character sketches as Gumbril tries to drum up interest in his project from a series of London acquaintances. Among them are Shearwater, a dilettante medical enthusiast; Lypiatt, a failed artist and self-proclaimed "man of genius"; Mercaptan, a bloviating critic; and world-weary socialite Mrs. Myra Viveash. The story isn't really about the pants, but about the men's failures. Each of them fumbles at profundity while trying to gain the affections of the beautiful Myra, which adds an entertaining dimension to Huxley's excoriating depiction of self-seriousness and idleness. It's a riot.
