Huxley sharpens the tools which he employed in writing Crome Yellow and delivers an atmosphere which, it seems to me, could only be tasted in those akward post-fin-du-siècle times.

Witty, cynical and never failing to be satirycal, he proceeds to describe perfectly detailed characters who do not do much more than talking throughout the story - and I kind of gladfully expected it when I picked up the book.

As it usually seems to happen in his works, female characters lack some depth, but I dare say he seems to implicitly suggest that they are slaves of what society (i.e. male characters) expects from them, thus making a fine comparison between Mary, for instance, and the three male protagonists, who all seem to lack something in the end and are unable to obtain it because they are too obsessed with their own way of life.

In general, it reads playfully well. It has a delightful balance between comedy and melancholy, and a great deal of those conversations you would love to participate in - the same which, ironically, Mrs. Aldwinkle obsessively looks out for without realising that she is often there to witness them, and she just cannot realise it because she is distracted by what these moments ought to be instead of what they really are (she could use some Chelifer's truth serum, I am sure), so much that she never developed the tools to understand such themes.

What strikes me as puzzling, though, is the relation between the title and the characters. Some say that they represent Huxley's various facets, but I wonder if he would fall for something as cheap as self-deprecating himself as being superficial by exposing the shallowness of all his tracts.

It seems to me that, just like barren leaves, the characters, save the younger ones, who might be on their way to do just the same mistakes as the elder, have beautifully accomplished what should be the natural path of people who were not 'born to sow the earth' (of course, take this as a merely social description void of any philosophical value), that is living to become something different and to look (not to find) something more to it, since they all express and feel emotions that, however uncertain, or wrong or improbable, differ from the animal status of life so much that you should not deny the fact that they are, in the end, 'living souls'.

I cannot agree, either, with those who say that the novel is absolutely critical of the lesser aristocracy/bourgeoisie - mostly because of how comic and unattractive Mr. Falx sounds all the time. He is so deliberately (from the writing process point of view) boring, he doesn't even try to sound believable. This clearly demonstrates, in my opinion, that Huxley knew well that sophisticated as well as elevated thinking, unfortunately, requires the boredom which instead derives from having nothing useful or necessary to do.
("That's good", said Mr. Cardan, "I should be sorry to think you were doing anything actively useful. You retain the instincts of a gentleman; that's excellent...")

Mr. Chelifer might agree on this, if he were to read it in fifty years from his notes, because it sounds precisely like the kind of harsh reality we should courageously face - that everyone has their own suffocating cage, whatever the social class, and that, at some point, however interesting we might have been, we might well all end up withering like barren leaves, a meagre but sweetly melancholic memento for the people to come.