How the Modest Hairdresser is Deflowered by a Millionaire, becomes Involved with a Member of a Superior Class, and Finally Learns that Love was All the Time to be Found in the Cubicle at Work … Some rather maudlin modern Moll Flanders? The newest packaged product, hot from the conveyor-belt? Alas, no: an outline of Elizabeth Jane Howard's new and, as her publishers say, "long-awaited" novel [Getting It Right], which seems to have been written under some odd and regrettable compulsions towards up-to-dateness, from which she should feel herself honourably absolved.

Her timid virgin hairdresser [Gavin] is male, slightly improbably aged thirty-one, a victim of acne and boils, living at home in New Barnet with his parents, his records, his poetry books, and his fantasies about women. At the book's outset, he goes to a party in Knightsbridge with some homosexuals he knows (introduced, one imagines, to allow the...