I liked this book in a middling way but spoiled getting the best of it for myself as I could not get a straight run at it due to other distractions. However, because there was no plot I could not lose that so it held together under the circumstances better than a novel with a complicated plot and storyline would have. The last chapters covering the fair I did get a fair run at and enjoyed those.
I thought the prose good but in that, and especially for its satire and humor also, I didn't think he quite matched his contemporary Evelyn Waugh, for example. Maybe Huxley's writing was quieted by his being more of a philosopher (and did he have a more privileged background which dulled his criticism of the "layabouts"?).
I wondered if there was some agenda of Huxley's when writing Denis as being stuck with writer's block? Also, if the book had maybe lost some of its bite as its allusions to real persons in the contemporary world would have been more obvious to contemporary readers; whereas, as best I remember, Waugh's novels, for example, did not have such allusions to real contemporaries so does not age so much in that respect.
While the opportunities to base a modern novel on the chatterings of layabouts sponging on manor owning layabouts might be thin and far between nowadays, I wondered if there was another modern opportunity for a plotless novel. It came to mind that a good one, in some sort of parallel, could likely be written based on the chatterings of the twitterarti, and the toils of the sufferers of exaggerated wokiness and snowflakiness in their constant vigilance for opportunities to trigger themselves into finger wagging and anger; they all sponge within the modern virtual manors of the internet. I have, of course, like Huxley, Waugh, etc., used strychnine as ink to write this paragraph
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