So here, 85 years after Brave New World was written, is the book report I never got around to writing back in 11th grade:īrave New World is set several hundred years in the future, in a global society in which human life is carefully programmed from womb to tomb - or rather, from bottle to incinerator, since the nuclear family has been abolished. It’s also exhilarating and thought-provoking and sort of wonderful. Brave New World is an unwieldy book, no question about it, clumsily-structured and heavy-handed and overambitious and satirically obvious. The content was another matter - the words have held up far more strongly than the paper they’re printed on. Each page fell from the binding as I gingerly turned it, so that I was left with a stack of yellow leafs when I was done. The copy my friend gave me only had one perusal left in it, alas - it gave its life so that I might be enriched. But I hadn’t actually sat down and read the story to see how it holds up. Back in high-school English class we read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and our redoubtable teacher “Critter” McCabe showed us a ‘70s-era TV-movie of the Huxley yarn as an example of another dystopian vision. It’s one of those books one hears so much about at second hand that it’s easy to forget that you’ve never read it. But some time later I happened to notice it atop a stack of books in my office, and it occurred to me that I’d never read Brave New World. The back cover copy pants “This is the savage, witty and shocking story of a natural man in an unnatural world… a licentious world where morality as we know it is taboo.” (Woo-hoo!) Best of all is a quote from a review - from a Montgomery, Alabama newspaper - just inside the front cover: “Huxley portrays a fantastic, incredible, licentious, unvirtuous world…in which only a few can recall Shakespeare but everyone is enthralled by sports and promiscuous sex…”Īnyway, I chuckled at all this, as she knew I would, then set the tattered, crumbling old volume aside.
Next to the line “The mighty novel of a soulless, streamlined Eden - and the two who escape it” the cover shows a man and a woman, naked but with a sort of mist obscuring their naughty bits, climbing through an abstract aperture beyond which we can see a hint of a futuristic city.
She thought that I would be amused by the cover, which pitched the book as a lurid pulp novel. A few years ago a friend gave me a gift she’d found in a used-book sale somewhere - a Bantam paperback edition, from 1955 (price 35 cents) of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
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