Tom Sharpe is that comparatively rare phenomenon, a contemporary writer who manages to make a living from his novels alone. With only two of his novels published in the United States, the combined sales of his works in paperback approach two million in Great Britain. After a life spent as a teacher and a photographer in South Africa and England, he began writing fiction at the age of forty-one. His novels of grotesque and savage farce (the dust-jacket blurb for his most recent, Ancestral Vices, 1980, describes it, unashamedly, as "insensitive") draw on a range of cultural and intellectual preoccupations that resemble those of earlier comic novelists such as Thomas Love Peacock and Aldous Huxley. However, the methods of their construction are closer to those of English popular novelist Dornford Yates, whose work Sharpe loathes, and P. G. Wodehouse, whose satiric style he respects. To prepare himself for writing...