Books: Smart Inferno

RECAPTURE THE MOON—Sylvia Thompson—Little, Brown ($2.50).

Since Aldous Huxley wrote Antic Hay in 1923, fair-minded U. S. readers may have felt that the English upper classes were getting a raw deal in modern English fiction. The works of Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Firbank and lesser observers of the upperworld contain few characters above the rank of a knight or above the £5,000-a-year income level who are untouched by insipidity, depravity, or both. This week the far less satiric Sylvia Thompson (The Hounds of Spring) contributed another long, episodic novel depicting some unsavory doings among...