1963 issue, writing, "Many first novels are excessively autobiographical, but A Man from Elsewhere suffers from the opposite fault of being a cerebral construct, dreamed up out of literature and the contemporary French cinema." Simon Raven wrote in The Observer on 15 September 1963, "Mr. Farrell's style is spare, his plotting lucid and well timed; his expositions of moral or political problems are pungent if occasionally didactic." It entirely lacks the ironic humour and tender appreciation of human frailty that characterise his later work. Farrell came to dislike the book. Two years after this came The Lung, in which Farrell returned to his real-life trauma of less than a decade earlier: the main character Martin Sands contracts polio and has to spend a long period in hospital. It has been noted that it is somewhat modelled after Farrell, but it is modelled more after Geoffrey Firmin from Malcolm Lowry's 1947 novel, Under the Volcano. The anonymous reviewer for The Observer on 31 October 1965 wrote, "Mr. Farrell gives the pleasantly solid impression of really having something to write about", and one for The Times Literary Supplement on 11 November 1965 that "Mr. Farrell's is an effective, potent brew, compounded of desperation and a certain wild hilarity." In 1967, Farrell published A Girl in the Head. The protagonist, the impoverished Polish count Boris Slattery, lives in the fictional English seaside town of Maidenhair Bay, in the house of the Dongeon family (believed to be modelled after V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas). His marriage to Flower Dongeon is decaying. His companion is Dr. Cohen, who is a dying alcoholic. Boris also has sex with an underage teenager, June Furlough, and fantasises about Ines, a Swedish summer guest, the titular "girl in the head". Boris is believed to be modelled on Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Like its two predecessors, the book met only middling critical and public reaction. In the 13 July 1967 issue of The Listener, Ian Hamilton wrote that he disliked the novel, and thought it was, at best, an "adroit pastiche" of Samuel Beckett's deadbeats. Martin Levin in The New York Times Book Review on 23 March 1969 praised Farrell's "flair for giving the ridiculous an inspired originality". An anonymous reviewer in The New York Times Book Review on 20 July 1967 wrote, "verbal assurance and resourcefulness show that Mr. Farrell is not content to