Alexander Eliot

Love Play (New York: NAL, 1966)

“A big, fat, lewd, philosophic work of fiction, pure and impure … a free-for-all with Rabelais as a referee.” Thus Alexander Eliot describes Love Play, a work of dazzling verbal pyrotechnics, razor-keen wit, and outrageously hilarious (and to some readers, no doubt, (simply outrageous) sexual high jinks.

Love Play is the title of this novel in play form and the spirit of play animates its pages: the soaring lyric play of delightfully divergent ideas, and the ribald, earthy play of the bodily passions. Leading the list of players is the books wondrous heroine, Ellen Freeman, a girl of high ideals and fervent desires, with a golden voice and a golden body, equally generous with both. Ellen is a Lolita past the age of consent, a Candy sans illusions: she is an all-American fantasy come true.

For these and other vivid characters, both male and female, young, middle-aged and old, the author has created a magnificently entertaining divertissement. Scintillating, shocking, wildly funny by turns, Love Play is the most original book of the year.