Letters

Short Story by Aldous Huxley If you like Aldous Huxley's early stories, here is one, so to speak, for the books. Perceptive and prescient of later themes in our culture,  the short story, or more accurately, the novella, "Two or Three Graces”  displays Huxley's brilliant registration of postwar England and its "modern" society. This is a highly perceptive, somewhat meandering story, full of startling insights and clever verbal constructions. This novella has something new and something old. The "new" is a plotting style that prefigures his later work. Plots weave in and out of each other, nesting in each other, with a previous theme popping up later in the story.  The polyphonic movement of the plot, with one encounter or relationship intermingling with another, then  diverging then reuniting or,  would be later reified in the title of another book, Point-Counterpoint. Meanwhile, the  "old" aspect of "Two or Three Graces" is that Hux