A charming novel about the struggle between living according to the world's rules and your own. The protagonist Gordon Comstock is a character drenched in existential dread, stumbling scathingly on the demands impressed upon him by society and the people around him to 'make something of himself' and 'get a good job', which he vehemently opposes, declaring a 'war on money' and on the rigidity of living within the literal and metaphorical borders of society. His need for escape is paralleled by his deep dependence on the world around him; he has a strong addiction to both defiance and acceptance, which creates a sizable gap beneath him, tearing him apart. A great example for this is his relationship to his sister, whom he both depends on monetarily to live, to afford things such as cigarattes and a day out of town, but whose pleas he defies (with a heavy heart). He is determined to 'sink into the ultimate mud', the lowest of the low, in a bid to expunge himself and declare himself a non-member, separate, sole, unattached to the world. But despite his efforts to 'free' himself from and live outside of the system of societal functioning, he finally succumbs to the ordinary life, realizing, with the help of a close friend, that it is no defeat at all, but a sort of you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours victory.

The only criticism I felt was necessary is that the novel seems to insist that those two areas of existence, a life within society and a life free from society, are mutually exclusive. It fails to account for the fact that, though the submission to an ordinary life is no defeat, that does not, or should not, imply that one must forgoe all dreams of extraordinary elements in an ordinary life. I felt a subtle melancholy once Gordon let his book of poems slip through the street drain. I felt as though his determination to keep himself writing was admirable, and further necessary, to keep alive some notion himself, of Gordon-ness, which need not have been let go of. I felt it would have been more favorable had the novel accounted for that grey area, of living within and being a part of the structure of the world, but nevertheless being crucially and beautifully apart from the world, with a tamed but strong stubborness to still have the courage to keep alive some sense of one-ness, a sense of the possibility of the extraordinary, of divergence despite an attachment and relationship with the ordinary, no matter how timid or ambitious those desires are, as long as the longing for freedom and the cherished solace of an ordinary existence do not go to war with each other.