“Found his anxiety frothing”

Denton Welch’s novel is largely set in the lightly disguised Oatlands Hotel in Surrey. Its setting is a theatrical one, staging the painful pleasures of youth. For his fictional counterpart, an adolescent boy named Orvil Pym, the holiday would seem to be a respite from the agonies of private school. Yet the hotel is a site of ambivalence. Its sumptuousness, meant to encourage relaxation and the pleasures of luxury, only prompts the contemplation for what and who Pym has lost. But since this is a Camp novel, the hotel also tantalizingly holds out the possibility for artful and psychic reformation.