KISSED THE GIRLS AND MADE THEM CRY

An angry young man (or as he says, violent), a ""lout from the lower middle class morality belt"" achieving that upward mobility, through a first disastrous marriage to a titled girl, as a photographer--you've been here before in the novels and plays of about ten years ago. This one is told in a scrappy first person with a certain aggressive urgency by George, now that he's almost forty, now that his best friend (brother-mentor-father figure-et al) has died, and now that he's ready to put away childish things. The retrospective includes a time at school; the war years and after when he lived ""at the top of (his) voice""; the failure with Fiona; and the adulterous love affair with Jean which he could never really reconcile with that residual lower middle class morality...The novel--it's a first--is handled with a certain thrust which asserts itself over the familiarity of what it is saying, and what has been said before, so that it seems to matter, momentarily.