ITS UGLY HEAD

The narrator of this book, a depressed London journalist, is an exceedingly angry young man. He is angry at his wife, Cynara, a strip teaser with artistic pretensions and ingenious devices with which to evade the restrictions imposed upon her by parliament. He is angry with the teen-age socialite for whom he obtains an abortion, whom he retrieves, marries and then once again loses, this time to a woman. He is angry at his career, which with all his other preoccupations--climbing in and out of English Manor House windows--is not going so well. He is angry at his pursuit of a beauty which inevitably withers in his hand. And unless the reader of this book is possessed by a peculiarly morbid turn of mind, the trippings hither and thither of this ""sensitive"" young man with their constitutional lack of purpose or vitality will leave him, if not angry, at least mildly irritated.