Books: The Devil & the Deep Blue Huxley

APE AND ESSENCE (205 pp.)—Aldous Huxley—Harper ($2.50).

"I'd rather be myself . . . Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly." So declaims the unadjustable hero of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's satiric fable about a totally efficient, totally soulless Utopia. This defense of the unreconstructed individual, who refuses to run with the mob, is a central theme in much of Huxley's writing, and it spills all over his latest novel. But where Brave New World was a neat stiletto jab into the tender hide of the reforming perfectionists, Ape and Essence, a...

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