It would be a great deal easier to like Frederic Raphael as a writer if his technical skill were less, or—since he is as scandalously accomplished as he is—if he felt less insecure about his readers' recognition of it. To puzzle over seven (or 17) types of ambiguity is pleasure of a high order; but to have them all pointed out, if not actually explained, with much nudging of bold type and winking of italics and puns significantly laid along the knows, is affronting: especially when, as in California Time, you find you cannot do without these artful aids.

'California time' is, its inventor says, 'a sequence of presents'—which in his book are given and received as well as lived through by people with [symbolically loaded] names…. California Time, on the other hand, is a sequence of paragraphs alternately printed in bold and light type, of...