by Richard Condon

Richard Condon’s first two novels...are brilliant, highly individualistic, and hopelessly unfashionable demonstrations of how to write stylishly, tell fascinating stories, assemble plots that suggest the peerless mazes of Wilkie Collins, be very funny, make acute social observations, and ram home digestible morals. They demonstrate, in short, a good many of the things that were expected of the novel before the creative-writing courses got its practitioners brooding in their mirrors...[This] is a wild and exhilarating satire, which keeps succumbing to the heartburn of heavy sarcasm...Mr. Condon’s story, which is balanced on an infallible use of suspense and surprise is ingenious...Mr. Condon oils this nonsense with self-caricaturing horrors...but these bulging irregularities are always contained by Mr. Condon’s Roman-candle prose.