This novel moves beyond the largely autobiographical concerns of John Oloughlin's earlier experiments in the genre towards a more fictional integrity which led him by the nose, so to speak, into contexts and settings largely outside the domain of personal experience. To be sure, the subjectivity of his first novel 'Fixed Limits' is in some degree still present (witness the opening chapter ... with its highly philosophical considerations), but it is now subordinate to the unfolding narrative ... as we follow the fortunes of James Kelly, a self-styled philosopher, through successive love-affairs which clash with his loyalties to friends and benefactors alike, culminating in deception and tragedy for all concerned. One would think that CROSS-PURPOSES was a philosophical-novel-turned-romance, and so, up to a point, it is. But it is also a tribute, in no small measure, to both Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller; though one might be forgiven for detecting an implicit condemnation of the latter in Chapter 7, set in Paris, where Kelly's attitude to sexual promiscuity is concerned!