Extraordinary and inspired novel containing some of his sharpest satire, this time aimed at America -- the opening segment featuring an hallucinatory car ride through southern California is perfectly realized. Stated first edition first printing. Publishers dust jacket in good + condition, unclipped $2.50 price, nicks/chips to edges, closed tear to front panel, crease to back panel. Owner name on ffep, boards straight, sharp. Originally titled After Many A Summer as initially released in the United Kingdom.

Story of America's superficiality & a Hollywood millionaire fearful of imminent death (the secret to eternal life is discovered in the chemistry of a carp), who decides to extend his life despite discovering the cost of acquiring apelike features. Written shortly after the author's relocating from England to California. The title is taken from Tennyson's poem Tithonus, about a Greek mythology figure whom Aurora gave eternal life but not eternal youth. The book received the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

This book is a somewhat odd mash-up of satire and philosophical lecture. On the one hand, we have an uber rich old man, Jo Stoyte, who lives in a castle in the San Fernando Valley. He owns a bank, a cemetery, an oil company… his home is reminiscent of Hearst Castle, filled with every modern convenience and stuffed with art from around the world bought with no plan or passion. His very young live in girlfriend is called The Baby. He also has a live in physician, Obispo, who has no redeeming qualities, (I do wonder where he got his degree) to watch over him, give him testosterone shots, and do research on extending the human life span. At the beginning of the story a British scholar, Jeremy Pordage, arrives, to work on the crates and crates of documents from the Hauberk family- this seems at first to have no bearing on the story, but in the end, it very much does. The other main characters are Peter, Obispo’s young, innocent assistant, and Mr. Propter, who does not live in the castle. While the other characters are the satire of capitalism, lechery, conspicuous consumption, Forest Lawn type cemeteries, and the fear of death, Propter is the moral and philosophical force. And, sadly, while the rest of the story is pretty amusing- and horrific in places- Propter is as dry as a mummy’s fart. He’s a noble person- he helps out the migrant workers (remember, this is during the Depression), is working on a way for people to be self-sufficient, and is against the kind of wealth aggregation that Stoyte represents- but he does not serve to advance the plot at all. It’s like Huxley couldn’t decide what kind of book to write, so he wrote them both and did not blend them elegantly at all. Four stars. ( )

Jeremy Pordage is an English archivist who takes a job working for Jo Stoyte, a millionaire Californian who collects valuable objects without much knowledge about or interest in them. Stoyte's latest acquisition is something called the Hauberk papers, and Pordage is thrilled to get to go through them, cataloging and delving into the papers of some family of English earls. He's thrilled at the job, but the surroundings and people prove to be a bit beyond what he might have expected to deal with. Stoyte is having a relationship with a young woman named Virginia, also called The Baby. She, in turn, is irresistible to Stoyte's doctor, Dr. Obispo, and Obispo's assistant Peter. Rounding out the cast of characters is Mr. Propter, a neighbor.

As is usually the case with Huxley's work, an entertaining story overlays an exploration of human attitudes and philosophies. The fear of death and the question of how to spend one's life are at the bottom of it all. Stoyte is terrified of dying, and Obispo and Pete are working to find ways to prolong human life. Unexpectedly, Pordage comes across a diary that may shed some light on the research Obispo is doing. Many more twists and turns occur in the plot, and much philosophizing is done by various characters, and it's really up to the reader how deeply he wants to explore each character's position. That's what I like about this book; it's easily read as just a mildly diverting and sometimes absurd story with a side of the meaning of life. But if you want, it can also make you think about your own feelings about death and what makes life worth living.

Recommended for: philosophers who don't take themselves too seriously, people who wonder about the wisdom of eternal life.

Quote: "Mr. Stoyte had a peculiar hatred for the ragged hordes of transients on whom he depended for the harvesting of his crops, a hatred that was more than the rich man's ordinary dislike of the poor. Not that he didn't experience that complex mixture of fear and physical disgust, of stifled compassion and shame transformed by repression into chronic exasperation." ( )

I started out enjoying it and then got baffled. About 3 or 4 chapters in, it veered into page after page of good versus evil and the nature of man and when it got back to other things, about 40 pages from the end, I was lost. It felt like a satire that I never got. Wanted to like it much more.

In many ways I like this book better than Brave New World, a book I stand by unreservedly. A satirical and philosophical exploration of futility, mortality, and enlightenment set in Huxley's very modern stereotype of the Southern California of the 1930s, it made me want to read both his spiritual book, The Perennial Philosophy, and Mike Davis's book on LA, City of Quartz. Some reviewers seem to think it is too dated to get 5 stars now, but I would argue (although I'm not going to get into it here) that considering when a work was written is critical in evaluating it, even if that means overlooking many elements that might seem quaint, even naive, to contemporary readers. We are talking about a book published in 1939, after all. ( )