Antic Hay
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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Publisher Description
Theodore Gumbril Junior is fed up with his job as a teacher, and tries a new tack as an inventor of pneumatic trousers. The development and marketing of these is set against his attempts to find love, and the backdrop of his friends’ and acquaintances’ similar quest for meaning in what seems to them a meaningless world.
Aldous Huxley, although primarily known these days for his seminal work Brave New World, gained fame in the 1920s as a writer of social satires such as this, his second novel. Condemned at the time for its frank treatment of sexuality and adultery—it was even banned in Australia—the book’s characters’ comic lack of stability following the society-wide alignment of the Great War still resonates today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
