Books: Tea Party

PROTHALAMIUM (127 pp.) — Philip Toynbee—Doubleday ($2.50).

Prothalamium is a novel for readers who have time to read a book twice. It is a razzle-dazzle literary experiment whose pedigree, all too obviously, reads: by James Joyce out of Virginia Woolf. To help forestall and dispel confusion while following his cast of "Narrators," Author Philip Toynbee provides a lettered and numbered graph (something Joyce never did for Prothalamium1's mighty ancestor, Ulysses). Given this pretentious orientation, reading Prothalamium is something like doing sums in your head: drop one character and carry two.

The bride and groom mirrored in the title are "the Living and the...

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