Are You Experienced?

The US debut of British novelist Sutcliffe is a perfectly hip riff on either The Razor's Edge or Innocents Abroad - take your pick - in which a pilgrimage to India enables a callow English yob to understand just how badly he wants to remain unenlightened. Dave Greenford, like any 18-year-old, wants more than anything to get away. Anywhere. Even Switzerland, where he learns French and makes some money but comes home soon enough, convinced that he needs an even greater escape. "There was a general belief," James quickly infers from his friends, "that a long and unpleasant holiday was of crucial importance to one's development as a human being." And India, for distance and discomfort, can't be beat. It helps that Dave's incipient girlfriend Liz has been hot to visit India for some time, and that both Dave and Liz have wrung permission and some cash from their parents for a year of travel before settling down to university life. So the two are soon weaving their way through every hill station and hostel of the Lonely Planet guide, banging out with all the other Brits, and trying not to be taken for tourists. Dave even manages to get into Liz's pants for a while, though she quickly goes native on him and they split up, leaving Dave, with three months left before his return, on his own. Can he face the Subcontinent by himself?. India is usually too crowded to be very solitary, and Dave is the sort who makes friends easily: before long, he teams up with Rani, an Indian from London who speaks Dave's language (i.e., beer and girls) and is on the lam from an arranged marriage his family is forcing him into. Poor Dave and Ranj know they will have to give in and grow up eventually, but they're determined not to go down without a fight. For three months, at least. Unless they get laid first. Undergraduate humor at its best: raucous, irreverent, and dead-on funny. (Kirkus Reviews)