THE GREAT PURSUIT

by Tom Sharpe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1978

The transatlantic publishing business, satirized first with brisk authority and affectionately savage brio (in London), then with frenetic farce and off-target barbs (in America); Britisher Sharpe, author of five previous comic novels but little known here, is a joy at home but at sea overseas. His London hero is courtly, snuff-sniffing Frensic, ""a literary agent who despised nearly all the novels he handled so successfully,"" especially the one he has just received in the mail--Pause O Men for the Virgin, a highly anonymous manuscript about a Harold-and-Maude amour. ""The mind that penned--if minds can pen--this odyssey of lust is of a prurience indescribable,"" says Frensic. His fat American aide Sonia is even more enthusiastic: ""We get the culture buffs with significance, the weirdos with the porn and the marshmallows with romance."" So Frensic and Sonia sell the book to a grand but hungry London firm and then con N.Y. publisher Hutchmeyer (an unconvincing caricature) into a two-million U.S.-rights sale. The only catch: Hutchmeyer requires a flesh-and-blood author for the promotional tour, and the real author insists on total anonymity. Enter virginal Peter Piper, an unpublishable sap longing to see his name in print, who (infatuated with Sonia) agrees to pretend to have written Pause O Men. Piper's picaresque adventures in America, on the run with Hutchmeyer's hot-to-trot, plastic-surgeried wife (""the body of an accident prone eighteen-year-old and the face of an embalmed twentyfive""), wax a bit too silly as this duo rambles through pretended demises and a religious conversion down South. But all is well in a final England sequence: Frensic, by fabricating a libel suit and making ill-considered love to an Oxford typist, tracks down the true author of Pause O Men. Indubitably smile-worthy, however over-extended and imperfect.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1978

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1978

Categories: FICTION