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Turning up the contrast is the key to Novelist Bates's pulsing comedy of country manners. He spoofs the planned austerity of the ill-fare state with a rollicking image of the life abundant. He spoofs whey-faced bureaucratic automatons with lusty individualists whose color a Matisse might envy. The joke is funny precisely because the author does not insist on telling it.
At a zany cocktail party at novel's end, with host and guests planting fireworks under each other. Pop Larkin announces his daughter's engagement to Charlie. And Mariette. it turns out, is not pregnant after all. This is the only false alarm in a five-alarm blaze of a book that is just about perfick.