Mason Hoffenberg (1922–1986)

Pretty entertaining .... thought perhaps even a bit too sex rompy / pornographic for my taste. Straightforward, salacious, leering updating of Candide, but w/o the thoughtful part- just the relentless outrage of the innocent repeatedly taken advantage of by the randy men who cross her path. Often funny, but dwindlingly outrageous due to repeated violations of this sweet girls good intentions and desire for a deeper reality. That could have made it more thoughtful- more of the satire of the intellectual pretensions of the young smart set.… (mere)

Stupendously, unbelievably awful. Candy Christian is a beautiful, naïve, well-intentioned young student whose trusting nature gets her into all sorts of misadventures, most of which don't involve a whole lot of clothes. If you think that this would be a pretty good set-up for a sharp satire on sixties youth culture, you'd be right. Alternately, this could have been a kind of naughty picaresque: Forrest Gump, if he looked like Jane Mansfield. But just everything about this book is wrong. Candy herself is less "naïve" than straight-up lobotomized, a living, breathing sex doll, and her adventures consist mostly of her getting naked with a bunch of long-winded college-professor types. Even the hippie satire stuff doesn't really work until the book's final scene, where Candy's utter lack of personality gets turned into a sort of zen vacuity. Otherwise, what you're left with is some Jewish-themed humor that hasn't aged all that well and a bunch of regrettable slang terms for female genitalia (jelly-box, sugar scoop, and much worse). Oh, and the anecdote that apparently Terry Southern hadn't even read Voltaire's "Candide" before writing this one, and only picked it up and noticed the parallels after his book became a hit. That's a good one, but books with this much sex in them shouldn't be this boring. And they certainly don't have to be this creepy. This is the sort of book that gives smut a bad name.… (mere)