Point Counter Point

5 stars for the writing but I can't say it's an enjoyable read. Huxley dissects every personality until they appear gruesome and every philosophy as false comfort and there's not much left in the end. Grim but extraordinary.

I have always been an avid reader, but throughout my teens and early in college I read indiscriminately--Louisa May Alcott and Stephen King, Alex Haley and Piers Anthony, they were all gobbled down. And then, in college, I was assigned Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, and it changed the way I looked at books forever. For the first time in my life, I think, I really recognized that books could be about more than the plot, and that good writing could make you love a book even if you loathed all the characters.

I'm pretty sure I read Point Counter Point again soon after college, but at some point it disappeared from my library, and somewhere along the way every last bit of the book leaked out of my consciousness, because 25 years or so show more along, here I was reading the book again for the first time. Huxley uses the conversations and actions of a group of intellectuals, artists and writers, mostly, to explore passion and reason, the physical life vs. the intellectual life. Some of the characters are based on Huxley and his friends and acquaintances of the time, including D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry. For me, the most brilliant part of the book is the opening quarter, which moves from person to person, primarily at a party, introducing the characters and themes. There is also an orchestra, playing Bach's Suite in B minor, for flute and strings.

"In the opening largo John Sebastian had, with the help of Pongileoni's snout and the air column, made a statement: There are grand things in the world, noble things; there are men born kingly; there are real conquerors, intrinsic lords of the earth. But of an earth that is, oh! complex and multitudinous, he had gone on to reflect in the fugal allegro. You seem to have found the truth; clear, definite, unmistakeable, it is announced by the violins; you have it, you triumphantly hold it. But it slips out of your grasp to present itself in a new aspect among the cellos and yet again in terms of Pongileoni's vibrating air column. The parts live their separate lives; they touch, their paths cross, they combine for a moment to create a seemingly final and perfected harmony, only to break apart again. Each is always alone and separate and individual. 'I am I,' asserts the violin; 'the world revolves round me.' 'Round me,' calls the cello. 'Round me,' the flute insists. And all are equally right and equally wrong; and none of them will listen to the others.

"In the human fugue there are eighteen hundred million parts. The resultant noise means something perhaps to the statistician, nothing to the artist. It is only by considering one or two parts at a time that the artist can understand anything. Here, for example, is one particular part; and John Sebastian puts the case. The Rondeau begins, exquisitely and simply melodious, almost a folk song. It is a young girl singing to herself of love, in solitude, tenderly mournful. A young girl singing among the hills, with the clouds drifting overhead. But solitary as one of the floating clouds, a poet had been listening to her song. The thoughts that it provoked in him are the Sarabande that follows the Rondeau. His is a slow and lovely meditation on the beauty (in spite of squalor and stupidity), the profound goodness (in spite of all the evil), the oneness (in spite of such bewildering diversity) of the world. It is a beauty, a goodness, a unity that no intellectual research can discover, that analysis dispels, but of whose reality the spirit is from time to time suddenly and overwhelmingly convinced. A girl singing to herself under the clouds suffices to create the certitude. Even a fine morning is enough. Is it illusion or the revelation of profoundest truth? Who knows?"

The structure and theme set with this passage, Huxley brings his characters forward, singly and in groups, combining and recombining to examine modern man, and the intellectual life vs. the instinctual life. The reader gets the occasional glimpse into the notebooks of Philip Quarles, an author and intellectual (whose natural tendency towards introversion was heightened by a childhood accident that lamed him), as he plans a novel constructed like a Beethoven composition: "The musicalization of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound. . . . But on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions. . . . More interesting still, the modulations, not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is stated, then developed, push out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different. In sets of variations the process is carried a step further. . . . Put a novelist in the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations, which may be interesting--at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same story as you are, you can make a variation on the theme." He plans to use versions of his friends as characters. But, as he cautions, "The great defect of a novel of ideas is that it's a made-up affair. Necessarily; for people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren't quite real; they're slightly monstrous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run."

While some of his characters are monstrous (particularly Maurice Spandrell, based on Baudelaire, who deliberately lives a life of debauchery and vice, and is consequently bored and unable to feel), and none are particularly likable, the book ends before they become tiresome. show less

Bad people doing bad things, but in a very witty way. That is a brief, if incomplete, summary of Aldous Huxley's novel, Point Counter Point.
It is more broadly a "novel of ideas" with a novelist of ideas, Philip Quarles, at its center. Quarles is a withdrawn, cerebral man, ill at ease with the everyday world and its emotions. He is surrounded by friends and family whose lives are like those of the monsters that Philip writes about in his journal. Just as Philip decides to structure his novel on the contrapuntal techniques of music (think Bach and Beethoven) the novel Huxley has written is structured in the same way. We are presented with an opening overture of more than one-hundred-fifty pages at a dinner party that serves as an show more introduction to most of the characters. The remainder of the novel intersperses scenes from their lives, letters from lovers and most interesting, the writings of Philip Quarles, who with his wife spends most of the first half of the novel returning from India and who is the closest to a protagonist that we get. While there is a bit of a literary explosion near the end, this is more a novel of the daily lives of London sophisticates in the 1920s. It catalogues their alternately sordid and ludicrous (sometimes both) erotic adventures, which generally end unhappily.
I particularly enjoyed the wealth of references to literature and philosophy, Huxley's polymathic mind shows through on every page. Among the literary references was the use of Dickens in a way that captures one of his essential character traits, "the appearance of Dickensian young-girlishness" (p. 19). Overall, I found the play of wit and ideas compelling, enough to bear with the bad people and their antics. show less

This is Aldous Huxley's greatest novel. Oh, yes, "Brave New World" is also a classic, and indispensible. But, qua novel, this is Huxley's best. It is occasionally very funny, intellectually challenging, and a tad depressing. Huxley's cynical wit is conjoined with his love of dialogue and repartee and philosophic banter, and then placed in an overarching story that satisfyingly reveals the lives of a handful of fasccinating characters, one of them based on Huxley's friend D.H. Lawrence. Very, very good; and highly under-rated.

"The stertorous borborygmus of the dyspeptic Carlyle!"
Having come across a reference to this novel in Bill Bryson's "History...", I was curious about the characters. Not my favourite Huxley novel, but it was an interesting portrait of life in the 1920s, amongst a circle of friends including artists and writers. One character was based on Huxley himself, and offered an incite to his own thoughts about his profession - a writer who talks about putting a writer in a story, who is writing a story about a writer...ad infinitum! Huxley also describes music, in a seemingly experimental way.
I enjoyed learning about the real life characters his fictional ones were based on, D. H. Lawrence, Augustus John, Charles Baudelaire, and John Murray. The show more later being the most humourous portrayal in the story - a publisher choosing submitted stories not by their merit, but instead on the chances of spending time with the female authors upon acceptance of their works. I enjoyed the letters he dictated to his secretary on acceptance or dismissal, I guess Huxley himself received both at some times in his literary pursuits.
Overall I was expecting more of the scientifically minded eccentric characters ( as suggested by Bill Bryson), but the tale transpired to be more about artists and writers, and not as funny as his other novels. show less

Found a copy of this book in a hotel in Luang Prabang on my birthday and read it while travelling through Laos, China and the Philippines. Wonderfully written, and one of the few books that I've read that's made me stop in wonder at how the author has articulated a feeling I've had but not known how to put in to words.

This is one of the most extraordinary books I've ever read. I found a copy of it and plunged in with absolutely no knowledge of what it was about or even who the author was. I was gripped from the very first page. The cynical humour and incredibly perceptive analysis of characters that represent almost every facet of the human race reminded me of War and Peace at first (one of my favorite books).

Point Counter Point is absurdly intellectual - almost TOO intellectual for me. It's so complex that I can't even describe the things about it that made me love it. However, as someone who 'thinks too much' and has a naturally analytic mind, there were many places where I felt like I was reading something I could have written myself. It's a very show more exciting experience when you're reading a book and suddenly discover something like that. As a musician, I particularly appreciated the musical references. But perhaps my favorite moment was where Lord Edward's brother rings him up in great excitement to explain that he's just found mathematical proof of the existence of God.... show less