Magic Christian

Terry Southern

Read August 2003

An overrated book that fails to deliver on its promise.  Guy Grand believes that every man can be bought, and illustrates this principle in a few excellent early chapters.  At this point you imagine the book ramping up, wondering where this can possibly lead, and expecting a remarkable literary exploration of that at once repulsive and compelling notion, the price we can put on other people.  But the book remains an account of a sequence of sophomoric pranks.  Though the wit occasionally crackles, it's isn't enough to make it worth ploughing through the rest of this (brief) book.