Books: Why Not Viscerosophy?

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THE GENIUS AND THE GODDESS (168 pp.) Aldous Huxley—Harper ($2.75).

In latter-day Huxley novels, words speak louder than actions. It is no surprise, therefore, to find that his first novel in seven years is an urbane little lecture on grace and predestination, with witty asides on life, letters and the pursuit of happiness. The lecture notes rather dwarf a spindly triangle story of love and adultery in the high-I.Q. bracket.

Young John Rivers, a physicist who looks like a "Roman copy of Praxiteles," gets a chance in the early '205 to study with a pioneering genius in the field of atomics. The genius, Henry Maartens, is a wheezing hypochondriac who bubbles away on such topics as "fields of unembodied organization." Henry's personal universe "was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual."

Henry's jigger is his beautiful wife Katy. To John Rivers, a slightly priggish minister's son and a sexual teetotaler at 28, Katy is a lyric goddess, distant and holy as Dante's Beatrice. When a siege of illness puts Henry in an oxygen tent, John's Platonic devotion is rudely shattered. A shivering, sleepless Kate finds her way to his bed one night and stays there.

As Huxley tells it, this is just the earth-renewing touch of "animal grace" she needs in order to heal her ailing husband. The recuperating Henry suspects nothing, but the Maartenses' adolescent daughter suspects all. Before she gets a chance to spill it, "predestination" in the shape of a truck takes the life of mother and daughter in a grisly highway accident.

Except for this macabre and unconvincing finale, Huxley winds his characters up like talking clocks, and they keep up a steady ticktock of aphorisms, epigrams and reflections. Samples:

¶ "H. G. Wells . . . reminded her of the rice paddies in her native California. Acres and acres of shiny water, but never more than two inches deep."

¶ "Those ladies and gentlemen in Henry James's novels—could they ever bring themselves ... to go to the bathroom?"

¶ "While there is death, there is hope."

¶ "If you don't mention the physiological correlates of emotion, you're being false to the given facts . . . What we need is another set of words. Words that can express the natural togetherness of things. Muco-spiritual, for example, or dermatocharity . . . Why not viscerosophy?"

With his viscerosophical bifocals on, Huxley can make a subject like illicit sex seem excitingly muco-spiritual. But when it comes to fashioning moral judgments or making final points, The Genius and the Goddess manages to be as arbitrary—and as fuzzy—as the code of Hollywood's Johnston Office.