After disappearing from the Deputy Inspector's face, his nose shows up around town before returning to its proper place.

    Love in Excess and its reception provide a lively and valuable record of the challenge that female desire posed to social decorum.

    After he marries a woman he had seen eight years earlier, the story becomes, on one level, an analogy between his temporary sexual impotence and the position of intellectuals. A year later he is ready to abandon his wife and escape from the camp. Cameo appearances by philosophic and literary figures (Marx and Meng-tz, Othello and Song Ji) and discussing China and sex allow the incorporation of non-novelistic elements while indulging in gallows humor.