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 coast along merely imitating his previous work. Such a deliberate extension of range is perhaps a hopeful sign for a talent which, after three novels, still has not found the mode in which to fulfil its attractive promise."