It is a coincidence that this Tom Sharpe novel about the literature racket reached my attention at about the time that Edward St. Aubyn published his new book satirizing the Booker Prize. Sharpe is outlandish as usual, peppering the text with lunatics and the lovelorn and adding large-scale set-piece disasters to drive the plot. The silliness of the human animal is a theme Sharpe returns to, fruitfully, again and again. And what makes the books work is that there is less sneering than sympathy. St. Aubyn could do a lot worse handing this theme than following Sharpe's lead. We'll see.
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