I am very interested in how this book ["Eating People Is Wrong"] goes down in the United States. For several reasons, I am sure the author is one of the most intelligent and gifted of up-and-coming English novelists. I am also sure that the difficulties of writers getting read across the Atlantic—in either direction—are becoming, not less, but greater….

I say all this because Mr. Bradbury's novel, which is extremely funny, packed with intelligence and moral feeling, and au fond original, does present some difficulties of setting for American readers. It is basically a story of people trying to find meaning in their lives, and in particular trying to find meaning through the right love relation. That, of course, is the same in Sioux Falls as in Mr. Bradbury's English town. But Mr. Bradbury, like several other English writers of his generation, has chosen Malcolm (Stanley...