The Double View-originally published by the Dial Press in 1960-is Chandler Brossard"s frenzied novel of a group of dangerous New York sophisticates. Things are not always what they appear to be in this wildly satirical, wondrously funny, aberrant portrait of the socialites, pseudo intellectuals, sexual outlaws, and deranged idealists in 1950s Manhattan. Carter Barrows, the alcoholic, has been sent to an upstate asylum, having finally gone over the edge; while his wife, Janine, is having an affair with his best friend, Rand. Harry, alias Eddie, is committing his latest assault or petty theft with the help of his thrill-seeking sidekicks, Edna and Myrna. Phillips, the wandering Jewish intellectual, is close to bilking a philanthropist in Blue Point, Michigan, for a stipend. Margaret, the nymphomaniac, pays Joey and Nina to satisfy each other on her living room floor, while she sets her erotic sites on Hawkins, the Negro English professor and talk of the cocktail parties thrown by the Johnses-Upper East Side socialites. In this disturbing examination of the thin line that separates appearance and reality and sanity and insanity, Brossard"s characters go all the way in their weird attempts to make life what they think it should be. A scathing contemporaneous portrait of the Manhattan social scene of the 1950s, The Double View is a vivid and disturbing tragedy of urban duplicity.