Volume 12, Number 11 · June 5, 1969
Follies
By Christopher Ricks
The Girls
by Henri de Montherlant, translated by Terence Kilmartin
Harper & Row, 639 pp., $8.95
Something to Answer For
by P.H. Newby
Lippincott, 285 pp., $5.95
Impossible Object
by Nicholas Mosley
Coward-McCann, 219 pp., $4.95
The true novelist may be obliged to outrage his readers; the shrewd novelist will settle instead for being 'outrageous.' The true satirist will regret the fact that satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; the shrewd satirist will welcome such complacencies, glad that he can have all the prestige of being hard-hitting with no risk of bruising his knuckles. Caricature as indiscriminate and imprecise as that in Montherlant's The Girls exists to exonerate and gratify its purported victims, since nobody but a masochist need ever concede that Montherlant scores. Instead of a palpable hit, he offers a merciless drubbing—one which turns out to be that of the masseur. Not an anguished Timon, cynically profound and not merely 'profoundly cynical,' but an angostura Jaques, such as any court circle will find refreshingly tart.
Review, 2584 words
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