Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (1954)

 It was by now perfectly clear that my previous pattern of life was gone forever.  I can take a hint from the fates.  What new pattern would in due course emerge I had no means of telling.  Meanwhile there were certain problems which would undoubtedly give me no rest until I had at least made some attempt to solve them.                                                                                                                                                            -- Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (The Viking Press, 1954)

Under the Net was Murdoch's first novel, written in the first person and narrated by writer and sponger Jake Donaghue, it is often quite funny, taking place in the twentieth century with considerable influence of such eighteenth century picaresque novels as those of Tobias Smollett, author of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1754).  Murdoch's novel can be called The Adventures of Jake Donaghue, as the story follows Jake from woman to woman and from England to France in his search for adventure, love, friendship and commercial success as a writer and translator.

Murdoch's other influences below the narrative surface include Raymond Queneau (to whom the book is dedicated), Samuel Beckett, Sir Isaac Newton, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Shakespeare.  Jake is in love with singer and mime Anna Quentin, Anna is besotted with film producer Hugo Befounder, Hugo is besotted with Anna's sister Sadie, an actress, and Sadie is besotted with Jake; things get rather crazy, as Jake kidnaps a dog film star, Mr. Mars, owned by Sammy, a bookie friend of Sadie's. Jake is short of money and takes a job as an orderly, where he runs into Hugo, a patient with whom he had collaborated on a book without Hugo understanding what was going on, and Jake's best friend Finn departs for Ireland.  Confused and penniless at the end of the novel, Jake writes:  I wrote the cheque.  I reckoned that this left me with just about as much cash to my name as I had had when I left Earls Court Road at the beginning of this story.  I sighed a little over this, and for a moment the spectral fortunes which I had been so near to winning rose about me in a whirl until I was blinded in a snowstorm of five-pound notes.  But the tempest subsided; and I knew that I had no deep regrets.  Like a fish that swims calmly in deep water, I felt all about me the secure supporting pressure of my own life.  Ragged, inglorious, and apparently purposeless, but my own.