C andy satirizes everything it can about the emerging age of liberation of the 1960s. It particularly provides a send-up for a number of relevant issues — the pornographic novel itself, and clusters of wildly liberal, leftish fads of the era, such as Zen Buddhism, Taoist mysticism, tourism, Bohemian life in Greenwich Village, pop psychiatry with its experiments and fixation upon sex, group therapy, commune-living and commune jargon, Chinese acupuncture, dabblings in kinky sex, lascivious filmscripts, bathroom comedy of manners, and a quaint fondness for incest and freaks. The era was witnessing the "opening up" of Liberalism — even to the end of its tether — and was bending over backwards to embrace new extremes in theorizing, the sexual revolution, and acceptance of pornography as admissibly possessing "redeeming social values." Candy pillories the entire stock of these fads with flare and tipsy bad taste. It must...