Walking his dog in Hampstead Heath late one hot summer night, Conrad Jessup [name given to protagonist Conrad Hunt in the U.S. edition of "Hunt"]—failed artist, husband, father and gambler—comes upon the nearly dead body of a spiffily turned-out young lady.

He makes the mistake of phoning the police without volunteering his name. From there on his life is made a paranoid nightmare in this grimly absorbing novel by the English poet and critic A. Alvarez….

Mr. Alvarez [in "Hunt"] is ambitiously out to make a statement about the dismal state of contemporary English society through a loser hero….

But as a parable of England's decline, "Hunt" is rather too murky, schematic and arbitrary. The harder Mr. Alvarez tries to compare sagging London with Kafka's Prague, the less convincing he is to an American reader, who is likely to feel the novelist is jolly lucky...