Books: Medley

POINT COUNTER POINT—Aldous Huxley—Doubleday Doran ($2.50).

Intricate and difficult is counterpoint—"the art of adding melodies, according to fixed rules, as accompaniment to a given melody." If Author Huxley's "given melody" is perhaps the conflict between passion and reason, it is outnoised by his myriad irrelevant themes. If he has any "fixed rules," they are well camouflaged in a medley of deliriously discordant, rarely harmonious, characters—famous Artist Bidlake whose voluptuous youth has reluctantly passed into caustic Rabelaisian senility; his writer-son who flings aside a reproachful mistress for the wanton daughter of a musty scientist; a suave sadist who bullies, tortures, kills, for the...