Set "several years" before World War II (identified as 1930 by Welch's biographer Michael De-la-Noy[3]), it tells the story of a fifteen-year-old boy, Orvil Pym, who spends a summer holiday at a country hotel outside London with his widowed father and two older brothers.

[7] Welch's attachment to the place prevailed until the end of his life: writing in his journal a few months before his death, he lamented the demolition of the grotto ("the wickedly neglected, enchanted little corner!

In Chapter One Orvil's father picks him up from school and they spend the night in Oxford, before heading to Salisbury Plain to collect his older brother Ben.

[13] In The Spectator, Kate O'Brien, seeking "morality" or "conflict" in the story, found instead "undistinguished adventures in self-indulgence and self pity," adding that it made "somewhat uncomfortable reading in this tragic day.

"[14] However four years later in the same journal, Jean Bailhache considered the work to be "personal but pulsating with life quite unadulterated, by which, of course, I mean free from any adult interposition.

"[17] Of later criticism, in his 1974 assessment of Welch's writing, Robert Phillips subjects In Youth is Pleasure to a somewhat relentless Freudian analysis.

[21] Most surprisingly of all for a literary analysis, Phillips makes no mention of the source or meaning of the novel's title, despite Welch having inscribed a stanza of Wever's poem into part of the frontispiece design.

[22][23] In contrast to the almost exclusively psycho-sexual readings of In Youth is Pleasure, James Methuen-Campbell alone makes reference to the "deeply moving" episode in Chapter Seven where Orvil gives the schoolmaster an account of the last time he saw his mother.

Summarising the essence of the novel, in his introduction to the 1985 reprint of In Youth is Pleasure, William S. Burroughs wrote:Denton Welch makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes, for most of the experiences he describes are of a commonplace variety: a walk, a tea, a peach melba, rain on a river, a visit to an antiques store, a picture on a biscuit tin, a bicycle ride, adolescent tears.