Word: huxleyism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Donald Maclean was sandy-haired, tall, with great latent physical strength, but fat and rather flabby. Meeting him, one was conscious of both amiability and weakness. He did not seem a political animal but resembled the clever, helpless youth in a Huxley novel, an outsize Cherubino intent on amorous experience but too shy and clumsy to succeed. He sought refuge on the more impetuous and emancipated fringes of Bloomsbury and Chelsea...
...latter-day Huxley novels, words speak louder than actions. It is no surprise, therefore, to find that his first novel in seven years is an urbane little lecture on grace and predestination, with witty asides on life, letters and the pursuit of happiness. The lecture notes rather dwarf a spindly triangle story of love and adultery in the high-I.Q. bracket...
...Huxley tells it, this is just the earth-renewing touch of "animal grace" she needs in order to heal her ailing husband. The recuperating Henry suspects nothing, but the Maartenses' adolescent daughter suspects all. Before she gets a chance to spill it, "predestination" in the shape of a truck takes the life of mother and daughter in a grisly highway accident...
Except for this macabre and unconvincing finale, Huxley winds his characters up like talking clocks, and they keep up a steady ticktock of aphorisms, epigrams and reflections. Samples...
With his viscerosophical bifocals on, Huxley can make a subject like illicit sex seem excitingly muco-spiritual. But when it comes to fashioning moral judgments or making final points, The Genius and the Goddess manages to be as arbitrary-and as fuzzy-as the code of Hollywood's Johnston Office...