Customer Reviews (8)

Just A Funny Book
"Lucky Jim" is one of those books that has gotten less politically correct in the fifty or so years since it was written. Somehow it has avoided becoming too dated.However, reading Kingsley Amis's debut novel, there is the feeling that Amis himself would be delighted to hear that his book is considered sexist.

James "Jim" Dixon, the story's central character, is a quirky sort of anti-hero: well-meaning but selfish, he is conniving, spineless, and works just enough to keep his job.Despite it all, Dixon is quite is likeable. A junior lecturer at one of the new universities being built all over Britain in the 1950 and 60's, Dixon has an over-bearing boss, one Professor Welch, and a pathetic but psychotically manipulative girlfriend, Margot. To make matters worse, Margot lives with the Welches as part of her emotional blackmail of Dixon.

When Dixon is invited to a medieval "artsy" weekend at the Welch's country home, he is put in contact with Professor Welch's pretentiously artistic family. This includes his obnoxious son, Bertrand, an artist more interested in acting a part than actually painting.Dixon also meets Bertrand's non-committal girlfriend, who is not nearly so objectionable.

While it's a little formulaic, zaniness ensues.The thing with "Lucky Jim" is that it doesn't matter if the story is formulaic.The book is a good read.It's not just the laugh-out-loud parts, but that the whole story is funny. It's so well told that you can't wait to see how all this foolishness gets tied up.

Silly British campus foolishness it is though. This isn't for fans of in-your-face, shock comedy. This is England of the 1950's; everyone is very polite, but this desire not to be rude that is part of the fun. No one is able to come right out and speak plainly, so the comic action keeps spinning further and further from its center through country weekends, school dances, and what must be every pub in a college town.

"Lucky Jim" is a good debut from one of the more influential comic writers of the last century.Read it.

Young academics' must-read
This book was recommended to me wisely by several young (in their career) academics. It was so good that I wish I had saved it an extra year until I was going through the inevitable torment of the job hunt, and the various disgusting tangles academic life involves. I highly recommend this novel for some perspective on ivory tower ambitions and all the failed attempts.

Don't read this on a plane
You will be hooting with laughter, disturbing your seatmates, and causing consternation among the flight attendants.This book is amazingly funny.But you will need some working knowledge of British academia to 'get it'.Which means, if you know the difference between a 'grammar school' and a 'comprehensive',you can feel sort of snobby while you chortle hysterically.Plus, if you like the work of Martin Amis (Kingsley's son, for those of you who don't know your 'grammars' from 'comps'), you can now have one of those real 'aha' moments: as in 'I see!THIS is where he gets it!'.

Read it and weep (with laughter)
My oh my, this book is honest to goodness, hands down, one of the funniest books ever.Well - in my opinion.It's one of the few books that lives up to that awful cliche, 'laugh-out-loud funny'.

The Lucky Jim in question, Jim Dixon, is so human, and yet also so eccentric, irrational, and unintentionally hilarious - even the most absurd situation (and there are several) is understandable.The description of a hangover is so spot-on it's spooky, though I guess given Amis' reputation as a drinker, we shouldn't be surprised!The first review here gives a rather good plot summary, so I won't go into this.Highlights for me were the above-mentioned hangover, the sheets/blanket debacle, the various telephone impersonations, Dixon's habit of pulling extraordinarily odd faces for no particular reason, and of course the epic, drunken rant that is his lecture on 'Merrie Old England'.

I do think that the kind of humour Amis employs here is, as with all comedy, a matter of taste - it's a dry, absurdist kind of humour, quite English, and would appeal to those who enjoy Monty Python and/or Bridget Jones.And that, to me, is the best kind there is.Hilarious, wonderful fun.

A classic campus comedy, one of the great works of 20th Century British fiction
Kingsley Amis is one of my favorite writers, and Lucky Jim (1954) of course is probably his most famous novel. It's also his first novel, which makes him one of those writers who spent their entire career trying to live up to early success. Despite Lucky Jim's preeminent reputation, several later novels are at least as good: I'd mention as my personal favorites The Anti-Death League, The Green Man, Ending Up, The Alteration, and The Old Devils.

I think this is my third reading of Lucky Jim. It remains a very enjoyable book. It's the story of Jim Dixon, a history lecturer at a provincial English university shortly after the second world war. Jim is involved in an unsatisfactory relationship with a drippy fellow lecturer called Margaret Peel, who uses emotional blackmail such as implicit suicide attempts (she took sleeping pills after breaking with her previous boyfriend) to keep him on the string. He hates his job, and he hates his boss (Professor Welch) if anything even more, while worrying that he won't be retained for the next school year. He hates phoniness in general, particularly that represented by Professor Welch, who is into recreations of old English music (recorders and all).

The plot revolves mainly around Dixon's growing attraction to Christine Callaghan, a beautiful girl who is nominally Professor Welch's son Bertrand's girlfriend -- but Bertrand is also fooling around with a married woman, and he's a crummy artist to boot. Also, Dixon is working on a lecture about Merrie Olde Englande, which he hopes will impress Professor Welch enough that he can keep his job, but every sentence of which he hates. The resolution is predictable, if rather convenient for Dixon (involving a rich uncle of Christine's), but it satisfies. The book itself is really very funny: such set-pieces as Dixon's hangover-ridden lecture, and his disastrous drunken night at the Welch's, remain screams after multiple rereadings.

I should say that some things bother me a bit. Some of Dixon's stunts (such as stealing a colleague's insurance policies and burning them) seem, well, felonious. And of course Margaret Peel really is someone he's better off breaking up with, but the way Christine is presented as naturally good because she is beautiful does seem rather sexist. Still, all this can be laid to accurate description of a certain character -- and if we root for Jim (as we more or less naturally do), it should be with some uneasiness.

All this said, Lucky Jim is deservedly a classic of 20th Century fiction, and an enormously entertaining book. This edition includes an introduction by David Lodge, who is both an first rate writer of comic novels in the same mode as Lucky Jim, and a first rate critic as well.
... Read more

Book Description
Life in London means glamour, fashion, finance and art. Consider then an aging conductor, husband in an unsatisfactory marriage, father to an unhappy brood. When a young woman responds to his overtures, he breaks the marriage and bursts the family...alas, everyone loses in this drama, for nothing puts people together again.

Kingsley Amis is one of England's finest men of letters. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A brilliant author weaves yet another witty, comic tale
Kingsley Amis has again written a story of infidelity, destructive selfishness, and blatant stupidity and managed to make it hilarious.The basic story centers on a symphony conductor who, in an attempt to reawaken his lust for life, is having an ill-advised affair with a girl one-third his age. As you might expect, the disasters this creates in his life are quite entertaining. The narrator, an upper-crust music critic, speaks of the rapid disintegration of the conductor's family and his own love life with such detached snobbery, that even mundane events come alive with vivid humor.Especially funny is his description of a date that includes attending a wrestling event.One warning: Amis offers no clean-cut solutions, but turns expectations upside-down.The last page of Girl,20 comes as a surprise that will leave you wishing for more. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A last round for (or on) his friends
The famous founder of the original Angry Young Men offers up these mis-named memoirs.It is not an autobiography but more a collection of pub performances in written form.Which is no handicap to enjoying the collection: conversation remained an art in England long after it became extinct in America.

Some of the people profiled are not friends or enemies, but neglected writers whose stars Amis hoped to revive.The writer Elizabeth Taylor is one of these.Others, like Anthony Burgess and Enoch Powell, are simply famous people who were barely acquaintances, but with whom Amis had notable run-ins.

The profiles of his literary friends are mostly strings of amusing faux pas or escapades, usually drunken.He sportingly lingers over his own social pratfalls as much as over others'.Or maybe fair play has nothing to do with it; he just recognizes good material no matter who the subject is.In his own telling, he spends much of these events half in the bag, to the point of being unable to reconstruct them from memory later.Except for a passing opinion or two, he stays away from politics and literary theories, even giving Robert Conquest's limericks more ink than his Sovietology.He sticks to the same approach even with his nearest and dearest: his wives and novelist son only appear as part of some anecdote or other.

His view of America is like Frances Trollope's.Gleeful japes at the Ugly American abound, each more devastating than the last.Well, H. L. Mencken did it earlier and better.And no charge for saving England's bacon so many times, old top.

Here and there genuine affection for his closest friends bubbles to the surface.Philip Larkin appears throughout the collection, in addition to his own chapter, and Amis frequently quotes from Larkin's uncollected poetry.Under Amis' treatment, the mopey old onanist almost becomes a tragic figure.Other people like post-conversion Malcolm Muggeridge make no sense to him, as Amis does not have or at least does not display any spiritual side.

Taken altogether, this is a very English, sometimes acidly English, survey of one writer's circle of acquaintances, but not much of their era. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

delightful collection
wendy cope's delightful collection of poetry sparkles with wit and erudition. the highlight clearly being the title poem and the nursery rhymes. the typically sardonic brit humor shines through in most of her poems and make one laugh out loud. who ever thought reading poetry could be such a delightful experience?

however, one does wish there were a few more of her touching and sensitive poems like the one on her lover and the other one about a photograph. clearly the talent is there, maybe she will dish them all out in a separate collection one day.

till then enjoy finding out about the cocoa she made for kingsley amis.

Disappointed!
Having read Wendy Cope's poem 'He Tells Her'I was a little dissappointed in this book of her poems.
They are good but some are very similiar in nature.
I enjoy modern poetry and recommend Judith Viorst also a modern poet.

expected better
we don't get to see as much of wendy cope in the u.s. as i had hoped, so i ordered a couple of her books from amazon uk. the few poems i had come across of wendy cope's have been great poems. her touch of humor is excellent in those poems. but the poems in this collection are less than stellar. much of the time the rhymes are predictable and uninteresting. her repetition of styles and themes gets old (god knows she must love the villanelle). in this collection her nursery rhyme imitations are phenomena. i can just see wordsworth and eliot writing those. her strength seems to be in mimicry, which she didn't do much of here. i don't know, maybe the poems i like so much came from serious concerns. if you want to read someone who is a better formal poet, and has what is probably the greatest wit of any living poet, check out R.S. Gwynn's selected poems: No Word of Farewell. it's well worth it.

tump
I will be forever thankful for the day I picked up this book just for a look ,I read one poem then took it straight to the desk to buy. The next day I went back and bought Serious Concerns another collection of poems by Wendy Cope.
There just so damn good. Some are funny. Some are sad. Some are this .Some are that. Some are the other. Everyone I ever lent these books to loved them and then went out and bought their own copies. I cant lend you my copies (lost them moving to NewZealand) but I can recommend that you buy them now.

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
The fantastic Wendy Cope, with her glib wit and casual satire, has written a beautiful book -- funny, tender, and sarcastic, she turns the literary status quo (two hundred-odd years of pontificating males) on its head andleaves it hanging. She's just far too clever for the boys and we love it.Just buy it. Laugh out loud. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Don't read this book on the subway,
because, most likely, it will provoke loud screams of laughter and you'll embarrass yourself.Lucky Jim is the story of Jim Dixon, a lowly lecturer at an English university.In order to keep his job, he must suck up to the fabulously annoying professor, Ned Welch.He's also saddled with an annoying and not very attractive girlfriend and he's given to playing immature pranks on people he doesn't like.Indeed, he divides all mankind into two great classes:people he likes and people he doesn't.Jim also likes his booze, which occaisionally causes him trouble, particularly after an arty-farty week-end party at his boss's house.If you want to read something that's light but intelligent then Lucky Jim is a good choice.

Hilarious!
This book is absolutely hilarious! I don't know that I have ever laughed as hard while reading a book as I did in this one. The wit is both sharp and precise--you sam. But it isn't only funny, it has a tremendous warmth to it. If you aren't smiling from humor, you're smiling because of the connection with the characters.

Not only did I read this book with delight, I've actually given two copies to friends (this is not something i've ever done with secular books other than this one). I know of one professor who reads this book every year, and I may very well do the same. Get this book, you won't be disappointed.

A hilarious look at academia
Lucky Jim takes an amazingly cynical, yet hilarious view at academic culture!This book shows how funny it can be when people take themselves too seriously.You can't help but laugh out loud while reading it.

Witty Humor
It's a good story for those sick of overdramatization without intelligenge. Some things get a little bit out of hand,but only the wittiest survive. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU is the story of attractive little Jenny Bunn, come south to teach and confront head-on, the cold, cold world.

"The best novel Amis has written; it has the comic gusto, the loathing of pretension that made LUCKY JIM so engaging and high-spirited." (Listener)

"Incendiary stuff...a really formidable blaze. This is his most interesting so far...and no less funny than the first." (Observer) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Amis hits his stride with a funny but dark novel
Kingsley Amis opened his career with the novel that remained his most famous work to the end of his life: Lucky Jim. His next two novels were generally regarded as disappointments, at least relative to Lucky Jim. It is with his fourth novel, Take a Girl Like You, that Amis again hit his stride. This is as with almost all of Amis's works a comic novel, but much darker than Lucky Jim, with a cad for a leading man and a rather sad (morally) ending.

The protagonist is Jenny Bunn, a 20 year old girl from the North of England who has come to a middle class town near London to be a schoolteacher. Jenny is an extremely beautiful woman, a bit naive, and brought up with fairly conventional notions of sexual morality. Which have been a bit of a burden to her since about the age of 14, when she noticed that all of a sudden she was constantly the object of not always welcome male attention.

Soon enough at her somewhat depressing boarding house she meets a very charming and handsome man named Patrick Standish. Patrick is breaking up with her fellow boarder, a somewhat ramshackle Frenchwoman named Anna Le Page. Patrick immediately notices Jenny, the way all men seem to, and not long after he has asked her on a date. Which is quite a lot of fun, until Patrick closes the evening by rather insistently trying to seduce her.

Patrick is a schoolteacher himself, at a private school for boys, and apparently rather good at his job. He has the same problems with his bosses that every Amis leading man seems to have: his headmaster is pleasant enough but ineffectual, and another teacher is a very nasty piece of work. But we slowly gather that Patrick is far from blameless: most egregiously, he is not trying very hard to resist the head's 16 year old daughter's pathetic attempts to sleep with him. He also cruelly torments the clumsier and stupider people around him.

The novel portrays Patrick's courtship of Jenny, over roughly a year's period. This includes attempts to persuade her that her moral views are outdated, a long period of trying to be "not a bastard", failed attempts to resist having sex with other women he encounters while away from Jenny (the dates are a good thing, see, to prove to himself he really loves Jenny ... but he still has sex with the women) ... and finally an ultimatum to Jenny to sleep with him or end the relationship. Which leads to a crucial act and a dispiriting but believable conclusion. As it happens, this is the only novel to which Amis wrote a sequel: Difficulties With Girls, a couple of decades later, in which Jenny and Patrick are married, but Patrick is still philandering. That book ends a bit happier, with Jenny gaining the ultimate upper hand in their relationship.

I think this is an excellent novel. The various characters are thoroughly believable to me, and a varied and odd lot. Amis's comic eye for dialogue, and internal dialogue, is sharp as ever. The novel is funny when it needs to be, and honest and sad when it needs to be.

Take a Gril Like You
Spunky Jenny Bunn moves south to start her first taching job, having a recently failed relationship back home - which had a lot to do with her refusal for sex. Finally away from school & home - she feels she's ready to face the world & life - and she certainly gets her share of lessons - with her landlords, another tenant at home, a teacher at the local college who courts her, his weird flat mate, and co workers.

The book is a fun read, though a little naive & old fashioned. ... Read more

Book Description

Maurice Allington, landlord of the Green Man Inn, is the sole witness to the ghostly existence of Dr. Thomas Underhill, a notorious seventeenth-century sexual deviant and practitioner of the black arts. A desire to vindicate his sanity leads Allington to uncover the key to Underhill’s satanic secrets.

Customer Reviews (10)

Convivial spirits
Maurice Allington -- attractive, alcoholic, and fifty-three -- runs a small inn in the West Country, The Green Man, that is haunted by a most unquiet spirit: Dr Thomas Underhill, a seventeenth-century wizard with a reputation for killing his wife and other enemies by means of the black arts. Host and ghost would seem on the surface to have little in common, except Maurice has a dark side, an interest in sexual mischief and a tendency to use other people to get what he wants. When the heavy-drinking Maurice, who narrates the story, begins to see Dr Underhill and other ghosts about his inn himself, he cannot make his friends or family he is visited by anything other than the DTs; his siutation becomes desperate when he realizes the good dead doctor has a plan in store for him.

Thanks in part to a well-cast television adaptation with Albert Finney, Kingsley Amis's amusing little 1969 Gothic has oddly turned out to be one of the best-remembered of his novels (after LUCKY JIM, of course), even though it was mostly an experiment in genre. The ghost story is well done, and Maurice himself proves a very intelligent and convivial companion; still, the novel is less well executed than its elegant size and style might suggest (the scene with Maurice speaking with God seems a real mistake, and none of the other characters seems very well fleshed out). The thoughtfulness of the ghost story is still appreciated, especially since it came from an era when they were not so greatly in fashion. But you can't help wishing Amis had done a bit more with it--it seems (perhaps fittingly?) too insubstantial.

A SUCCESSFUL SATIRE AND THRILLER FROM KINGSLEY AMIS
Kingsley Amis' sole horror novel, "The Green Man," had long been on my list of "must read" books, for the simple reason that it has been highly recommended by three sources that I trust. British critic David Pringle chose it for inclusion in his overview volume "Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels," as did Michael Moorcock in "Fantasy: The 100 Best Books" AND Brian Aldiss in "Horror: 100 Best Books." As it turns out, all of this praise is not misplaced, and Amis' 1969 novel of modern-day satire and the supernatural is as entertaining as can be. The tale concerns a middle-aged man named Maurice Allington, who owns an inn called The Green Man in rural Hertfordshire, not far from Cambridge. Allington, when we meet him, is being kept busy running his inn, struggling through a floundering second marriage, dealing with his sullen 13-year-old daughter, drinking incredible amounts of scotch every day, and attempting to talk his new mistress into a three-way with him and his wife. As if he doesn't have enough on his plate, the ghost of diabolical necromancer Dr. Thomas Underhill --who used to live in the inn some 300 years before--has been contacting him of late, and the legendary Green Man himself (a sort of lumbering tree monster) has begun to make appearances, too. Those closest to poor Maurice suspect that his stories of ghosts and tiny birds that fly through his hand are a result of the DT's (it really is remarkable how much liquor Maurice drinks in a day), but the reader somehow never doubts that what Maurice sees is objective reality...Mixing social satire, amusing incidents and some good eerie scenes, "The Green Man" does keep the reader enthralled. Amis, no stranger to the bottle himself, from what I've read, seems to really identify with Allington, and uses him as his mouthpiece to expound eruditely on topics such as food (a hateful, bothersome nuisance), death (he wonders how one cannot be totally obsessed with the idea), sex (he thinks that women's "emotional secretiveness" is due to the fact that they do not ejaculate) and religion (Maurice's views of the afterlife are radically turned about by what he goes through in this tale). In one startling section of the book, Maurice meets a nice young man in a dark suit who stops Time and who, it is inferred, is none other than God himself, and another fascinating conversation ensues. "The Green Man" is not an especially frightening book, although some parts (the reading of Underhill's diary; the midnight disinterment of Underhill's grave; Maurice's "nighttime" vision in broad daylight) are indeed genuinely creepy. This is an extremely literate, extremely British ghost story that functions as both satire and thriller. In another section of the book, Maurice tells us that he thinks all novelists engage in a "puny and piffling art," and that fiction is pitifully inadequate to the task it sets itself. But perhaps narrator Maurice should read back the book he has just delivered to us; it is neither puny nor piffling, and succeeds on many levels indeed.

Nothing special.
This book isn't scary--only slightly amusing.The "English-ness" of the narrator is often funny & witty, but just as often annoying (I get the feeling that canned laughter at the end of the narrator's countless quips would lend a little force to his attempts at humor).I guess a lot of the point of the book is that very notion of the Englishman as a bottled-up, desperate figure, but that's just not interesting enough to justify this book.The supernatural events of the story mostly struck me as silly and disjointed.I'm sure there are a few interpretational aspects I'm missing (actually, this book doesn't feel worthy of much deep thought), but not enough, I think, to redeem this tale and make it worth the so-positive reviews it has garnered here.Read the _The Haunting of Hill House_ by Shirley Jackson if you want a nuanced, creepy, interesting, psychological haunted house story.After reading the last page of _The Green Man_, I just felt like shrugging, putting the book down, and moving on to something else.Get it from the library, but don't waste your money unless you know you'll like it.

A GREEN MAN AND PINK ELEPHANTS
Some of the best and most entertaining fiction by Kingsley Amis is comparatively little known, and I am pleased to see The Green Man available here and there. It has his usual virtues of offbeat humour, a gift for atmosphere, an engaging show of fogeyishness and some really memorable writing; and it has his occasional traits of implausibility, lapses of concentration and discursiveness, which I sometimes find irritating and sometimes entertaining depending on what mood I am in.

This is a distinctly original ghost story. Whether or not Amis found the basic inspiration for his green man in legends, or in The Golden Bough, or in other fiction I have no idea. I can't think of a similar creature in similar literature that I have come across, perhaps simply because there is no similar literature. The thread of the preternatural does not dominate the narrative, which is largely concerned with the interactions between the narrator and his family and acquaintances. The story is told by an alcoholic publican, remarkably lucid and vigorous for the most part, and opinionated and prejudiced in a way that suggests to me that the author had put some of himself into the character. He is the only character in the book who is drawn in the round, but his alcohol-dependency is not investigated in any depth, simply treated as a necessity to the plot. He is bored, grumpy and dissatisfied - familiar enough Amis themes - and predictably in search of sexual, if not precisely emotional, interest outside his rather flat and uninvolving marriage. To me, he is not completely convincing. He is rather grandly detached and above-it-all for someone with such a massive and corrosive problem of his own, but that is not the sort of quibble I would expect to bother Amis.

The real reason for the alcoholic theme is that the author is being a bit of an old tease. Allington, the publican, sees some pretty amazing things, and we are supposed to be left wondering to what extent they are objectively real and to what extent drink-induced delusions. For the most part they were real for me, and I believe real from the author's standpoint too, until the latter stages of the book. Here I detect a touch of wheel-slip - I simply think Amis is losing the plot a little, a suspicion confirmed by the way he winds up the narration in a slightly perfunctory manner. It's a fine story for all that. It will certainly appeal to his aficionados in general if they have not yet got around to it, and if you acquire it for a 5-or-6-hour flight or train journey on a caveat lector basis, I shall be disappointed if you are disappointed.

Through a whisky glass, darkly
In the early 1970s Amis seemed to be looking for a new direction.His initial series of comedies (_Lucky Jim_ and its successors in broadly similar mode) had begun bringing in diminishing returns, at least in terms of critical attention and sales.And later, in the 1980s, Amis found a different kind of form with _The Old Devils_ and his last books.

But at more or less the mid-point in his career Amis experimented with a series of genre novels.Of this series _The Alteration_ was science fiction (an alternate-worlds story in which the Reformation never happened), _The Riverside Murders_ is more or less in the English murder mystery tradition (that is, there is more interest in the puzzle than in the US crime novel, but at its best the English whodunnit is also more likely to give us human characters rather than groteques)._The Green Man_ is the last and most successful of the series, and is in the horror genre.

As a horror story "The Green Man" offers only mild chills, but its other rewards are substantial.It's a portrait of Maurice Allingham, drinker, womaniser and host of The Green Man, an English hotel with a fine table, excellent wine list, and a couple of picturesque ghosts, though with no recent sightings.

Maurice is both cynical and observant, yet he misses much of what is important of what goes on around him.The things he misses include sinister stirrings around him that indicate that the supernatural elements around him have not been so much extinct as dormant, and are now reawakening.More importantly he fails to observe almost everything of importance about those who are closest to him, his long(ish) suffering wife, his lonely, resentful teenage daughter, and his son, who has already moved on from him.

Though we are invited to see through Allingham's eyes, we are also given a portrait of Allingham, a man who has gone a long way on charm but is finding that trait not enough, any more, to stave off the consequences of various kinds of misbehaviour.With women he finds that they are still prepared to bed him, but they no longer seem to like him much.With his drinking he finds he can still lie to his doctor, but he cannot deny - at least to himself - the danger signs: shakes, mild strokes,visual and auditory hallucinations.And his teenage daughter still resents his absense from her life; but she is coming close to not minding any more.

Some critics have missed the strength and trenchancy of Amis' critique of his male narrators.Amis is often accused of misogyny for portrayals such as the women in "The Green Man", when in fact it is principally the narrator who Amis is mocking, not the women the narrator comments on.

This is the book that contains the famous "threesome" scene, in which the two women participants soon lose interest in the male narrator who believes he set up the scene.Maurice tries and fails to attract at least some attention, find a spare limb to involve himself with, and eventually gives up and gets dressed.The scene has been misread from time to time; it is probably not intended as a portrait of what Amis thinks must inevitably happen in a threesome, but rather a comic come-uppance for a character whose extreme selfishness, sexual and otherwise, is well delineated.

Both women then leave Maurice for good, showing in doing so considerably more strength or moral dignity than Maurice has yet managed.(There is a redemption, of sorts, towards the end of the book, when his attention is finally focussed, almst too late, on his daughter.)But Amis is, in most of his career (_Jake's Thing_ and _Stanley and the Women_ being exceptions) a more painful critic of male behaviour than of female.

Amis' use of the darker English folklore - the "Green Man" and "Thomas Underhill" myths - are also interestingly sinister.And the portrayal of "God" as a slightly camp, terribly urbane young man is one that has been hugely influential - in an unacknowledged way - in popular culture since "The Green Man" appeared.

By the way I think it clear that the supernatural events are "real".Maurice is not given his shakes and hallucinations to indicate that he is an unreliable observer in the manner of Henry James' governess in "The Turn of the Screw".The contrast is pointed, in fact, with an entertaining parody of James' prose style in the book.It is clear that Maurice does not "see things" in that sense or to quite that extent (in fact his trouble is that he does _not_ see things).Rather, Maurice's shakes, voices and palpitations mean that he will not be believed by his family, and he is forced to deal with things on his own.

This is a very fine comic novel, with mild horror and (as often with Amis) a little more depth than it pretends to.

Cheers!

Laon ... Read more

Book Description
Here is the authorized, definitive biography of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century literature, renowned for his blistering intelligence, savage wit and belligerent fierceness of opinion: Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation–having first achieved prominence with the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954 and as one of the Angry Young Men–but also a dominant figure in post—World War II British writing as novelist, poet, critic and polemicist.

In The Life of Kingsley Amis, Zachary Leader, acclaimed editor of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, draws not only on unpublished works and correspondence but also on interviews with a wide range of Amis’s friends, relatives, fellow writers, students and colleagues, many of whom have never spoken out before. The result is a compulsively readable account of Amis’s childhood, school days and life as a student at Oxford, teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father and lover. Even as he makes the case for Amis’s cultural
centrality–at his death Time magazine claimed that “the British decades between 1955 and 1995 should in fairness be called ‘the Amis era’”–Leader explores the writer’s phobias, self-doubts and ambitions; the controversies in which he was embroiled; and the role that drink played in a life bedeviled by erotic entanglements, domestic turbulence and personal disaster.

Dazzling for its thoroughness, psychological acuity and elegant style, The Life of Kingsley Amis is exemplary: literary biography at its very best. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

boring
I found it a struggle to stick with this biography, though I am a big fan of Kingsley Amis and was eager to learn more about his life.I wasn't impressed with author's writing style, found it a bit labored and muddy, andthe way he keeps looking for confirmation of Amis's persona in his fictional characters got extremely tiresome and distracting.I think the biggest prblem for me here is that the narrative just isn't smooth enough or captivating enough.I got the feeling that Leader was afraid to say anything truly critical.

Big But Good
This a hefty read -- there are relatively few biographies of literary figures that are as long.But, the length is worth it.Leader writes gracefully and interestingly about a man who often is hard to like but difficult not to admire.Most of us know Amis either as the author of "Lucky Jim" (book and movie) or as the father of the Booker Prize winner Martin Amis.Kingsley's career, however, is more important than those two claims to fame.He was one of the initiators of the Angry Young Men who had a major impact on English writing from the 1950s on.And, he brought back to English, and American poetry, an emphasis on accessibility to the average reader, although his effort is not always visible today.Further, he was the model of the hard-drinking, womanizing author that populates so much of popular fiction and film.In that story, we find a lot of what makes his life so sad as well as so interesting.And, this is an interesting book that takes you inside the creative process of writing and the destructive process of hard living.

Exhaustive/exhausting biography of a great writer
I love Amis' work and expect that he'll be read as long as literature has legs, but this bio requires a lot of stamina.It's all there: drinking, carousing, family life, contrarian politics, the wicked sense of humor.Leader did an enormous amount of research and doesn't pull punches about some serious character flaws.One thing that bugged me throughout was the implicit assumption that the books and poetry were autobiographical - besides being factually wrong, this drags things out unnecessarily.

If I was going to pick out a novel of Amis for the uninitiated, I'd have to make it 3 of them to show his versatility: "Lucky Jim", "The Alteration", and "Ending Up".But you wouldn't go wrong with "Take A Girl Like You", "Girl, 20", "The Anti-Death League", his collected short stories or any of his criticism. ... Read more

Amazon.com
A man who considered boredom the worst offense in fiction and nearly the worst offense in life, British novelist Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) is wrought larger than life in Eric Jacobs's engaging biography. Through his student years at Oxford (where "drinking, smoking, and behaving badly" formed the basis for many a friendship), his marriages and simultaneous affairs, his less-than- stellar teaching career, and his highly routinized years as writer and pub dweller, Amis was a merciless raconteur both in print and in person. He shunned all manner of things phony, fashionable, and, of course, boring, and honed his intellect into the acerbic observations that run through all his novels, from Lucky Jim to You Can't Do Both.

Jacobs plays to the Amis anti-academic mentality. The biography contains no scholarly apparatus and is happily footnote-free. The many colorful anecdotes are drawn from scotch-laced afternoon conversations with Amis in his later years and from peppery correspondence between Amis and such lifelong friends as poet Philip Larkin (whom Amis befriended because they were "savagely uninterested in the same things"). Jacobs is diligent about forming connections between the characters in Amis's fiction and the real-life sorrows and anxieties of their author: losing his virginity when an Oxford undergraduate to a girl who primed him with a sex manual is closely replayed in the novel You Can't Do Both.The overall effect is a clear view into a man of outrageous wit and genius and into the large legacy of novels, poetry, and essays he bequeathed. --Joan UrbanBook Description
Kingsley Amis arrived on the English literary scene with the publication of his classic novel Lucky Jim in 1954, and few writers since have provoked such wildly disparate degrees of laughter, admiration, and dismay in the reading public.For better or worse, Amis was known almost as much for his personality as for his work as a novelist.His outspoken nature (one columnist called him a literary rottweiler), his unfashionable praise for Thatcherism, and his devotion to whiskey kept him in the public eye. But in this, the only authorized biography of Amis, Eric Jacobs skillfully captures that personality with sympathetic detail and healthy doses of Amisian wit, spinning a narrative that mirrors the sprightliness and originality of his subject's work.

"Fond and very readable." (The Observer) ... Read more

Amazon.com
Although Kingsley Amis's acid satire of postwar British academic life has lost some of its bite in the four decades since it was published, it's still a rewarding read. And there's no denying how big an impact it had back then--Lucky Jim could be considered the first shot in the Oxbridge salvo that brought us Beyond the Fringe, That Was the Week That Was, and so much more.

In Lucky Jim, Amis introduces us to Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer at a British college who spends his days fending off the legions of malevolent twits that populate the school. His job is in constant danger, often for good reason. Lucky Jim hits the heights whenever Dixon tries to keep a preposterous situation from spinning out of control, which is every three pages or so. The final example of this--a lecture spewed by a hideously pickled Dixon--is a chapter's worth of comic nirvana. The book is not politically correct (Amis wasn't either), but take it for what it is, and you won't be disappointed.Book Description
Kingsley Amis has written a marvelously funny novel describing the attempts of England's postwar generation to break from that country's traditional class structure. When it appeared in England, LUCKY JIM provoked a heated controversy in which everyone took sides.Even W. Somerset Maugham reviewed the book, happily with great favor:"Mr. Kingsley Amis is so talented, his observations so keen, that you cannot fail to be convinced that the young men he so brilliantly describes truly represent the classes with which his novel is concerned." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (67)

Older but Never Dated
I think you simply have to be an academic to fully enjoy the comedy of Lucky Jim. Not that the jokes lost any of their flair over last half a century, Jim's misfortunes have a slapstick quality to them which can be funny even in Elisabethan comedies. Their full quality, however, is visible only to people who have had some experience with the world of academy. Yet there is a lot for every reader even living in safety far away from the world lead by the watchword "publish or perish".
I always tell me students who explain to me how good it is to be a university professor to read this book. So why shouldn't you try?

What's All the Fuss?
kingsley Amis' established himself as a literary celebrity in England with the publication with this short work of comedy, which would continue to occupy a comfortable niche in the academic-farce 'genre' for the duration of the trend. Yet I found Lucky Jim terribly stiff and antiquated; it lacks any of the satirical wit that it must have possessed during time of its publication. We are asked to follow a fairly inept junior professor through a series of contrived situations at a major university amidst a cast of comic-book-esque academic types. I suspect that this brief whimsy will be an object of sociological curiosity rather than a highly regarded work of literature. Kingsley has the ability to reveal the absurdity of a given culture. He does not however, have the ability to make it pulsate with life and mystery the way his son can.

Laugh Out Loud Goofball Professor[T]
Sometimes a book is about undertones, imagery, hidden or hard-to-find symbolism, or dreadful cynical askance of another's work. This is not such a book.

This is a great tale - full of laughs about the boyish personality of an overachieving academic named James - who we get to know as Lucky Jim.

He doesn't know exactly what or how he got into the university life, and soon learns he is really out of his element.He is not stuffy enough, he is not arrogant enough, he is not . . . enough.

Within a few months, a few hundred pages, he manages to burn his boss's bed and table - and opts not to confess to the embarrassing act, lusts and seeks the love of his boss's son, makes not one - but two - prank calls to the home of his boss, makes numerous false statements face-to-face to his boss, and plunders a speech his boss requests him to give.Best yet, the plundering involves mimicking his superiors while practically belching his words from his inebriated state.

At the end, you almost hear him say, "Take that you lout, and `yer whole family too."But, this occurs in the 1950's, in educated England, where and when people acted and spoke civilly to one another, even when the topic of discussion was anything but civil. So, there is no "out loud" in-your-face confrontation like that.

As someone who probably grew up reading Waugh, Shaw and Forster, Amis's dialogue richly resembles their great works as it depicts the unique and invariably different method of speech than what we entertain daily in 21st century America.

This was a lot of fun to read and "full of good laughs, old boy. Good show."

An Absolute Yawnfest!
When I read stuff on the back of this novel like, "preposterously brilliant", "a classic comic novel", and "Amis was a genuine comic writer, perhaps the best", I immediately snatched this book up and started rummaging through the sentences, paragraphs, and chapters with heightened interest. The book was interesting enough for me to buy it from Borders bookstore 30 minutes after reading a bit. Even though I didn't laugh, I believed I just had to read it from beginning to end. So I took this book home expecting something hilarious; the result: a genuine cure for insomnia. I don't care for all these praises of "masterpiece" or "this book explores the complexities of human condition and human relations". I want an interesting read; I'm not calling for an action-packed Ian Fleming, James Bond novel, I'm asking for something engrossing. I didn't get what I asked for.

The visually descriptive details in this novel are thoroughly lacking. Amis doesn't bother to write about the setting, the atmosphere, the people (except for Bertrand, Christine, and Margaret to some degree); as a result I have no idea what Welch, Dixon, Beesley, etc. look like. They all could be wearing bedsheets all the time for all I know.

All in all, this novel is not recommended: it lacks physical detail and humor.

P.S. If you search all the previous good recommendations you'll see the high reviews were simply given by "a reader"; probably the same dude.

Time have changed my perception.
Years ago, when I had the first oportunity to read this book, it seemed to be real fun, while today it is just description of general problems of academic enviroment, it looks that nothing have realy change or will change. The stagnation of academia
is a pemanent dilema: today teachings are the absolite truths, defended by the old guards. ... Read more

Book Description
In 1954, Kingsley Amis grabbed the attention of the literary world as one of the Angry Young Men with his first novel Lucky Jim. He maintained a public image of blistering intelligence, savage wit, and belligerent fierceness of opinion until his death in 1995. In his letters, he confirms the legendary aspects of his reputation, and much more. This collection contains more than eight hundred letters that divulge the secrets of the artist and the man, with an honesty and immediacy rare in any biography or memoir.

Amis, so assured in his pronouncements on fellow writers, grapples privately with fears, self-doubts, ambitions, and personal disasters. He is wildly funny, indulging in mordant gossip and astonishing frankness with his intimate friends and lovers. Some letters are dashed off with signature frustration; others are written with painstaking and painful circumspection. They make vivid the triumphs and tumult of his life and his times, from post-war Britain through the Thatcher era, as well as his attractions to women, jazz, drink, and the comic possibilities of the English language.

As an intellectual pugilist who took no prisoners, Kingsley Amis had few peers. These letters, at times scandalous, at times tragic, reinforce his historical relevance and literary stature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Amusing, interesting, often catty, revealing
Kingsley Amis is one of my favorite post-war novelists. I had not before read a collection of letters, and I confess there was a time when I would have thought the idea of actually reading through someone's lifetime of letters just plain idiotic. But in fact I found these fascinating -- interesting to read for the biographical details, hints of the creative process, discussion of his works and Philip Larkin's works in progress -- as well as often very very funny and sometimes eyebrow-raisingly nasty.

Zachary Leader has chosen about 800 of several thousand surviving letters. The great bulk are to the poet Philip Larkin, his closest friend. Another huge chunk are to another very close friend, the writer and Sovietologist Robert Conquest. He also corresponded a good deal with my favorite novelist, Anthony Powell, another good friend of his (though Amis betrays a certain lack of confidence in his friendship with AP -- I sense that he was intimidated by Powell's upper class background and lifestyle, by his rather mandarin literary taste, and by his age). There are many letters to his second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, as well as a rather unfortunate set of nasty comments about her in other letters after their rather ugly divorce. Lots of letters to agents and publishers -- these rather interesting from the writing business point of view. Quite a few responses to fan letters -- these generally quite gracious and often offering interesting answers to questions about Amis' books. Unfortunately no letters to Bruce Montgomery ("Edmund Crispin"), another of Amis' special friends: they cannot be inspected until 2035! Hilly Bardwell Amis Boyd, Lady Kilmarnock, his first wife, burned all his letters, perhaps understandably, after he left her (or she left him but because of his affair with Howard) in 1963. Amis in his life was reluctant have any of his other letters to women lovers printed, and Leader either didn't track down any such, or chose not to print them. As for his children, Philip did not keep his letters, Sally did not want them published, and Martin could find only a postcard or two (though apparently there were many more).

Highlights? His early letters to Larkin, with their complex
abbreviations and injokes, and the talk about poetry. The cattiness he displays towards writers whose work he disliked, such as most obviously John Wain, his fellow "Angry Young Man". Amis on "Old English Literature": "The prose is admitted even by initiates to be stumbling and graceless; the verse is shackled by continual repetitions of idea ... This is the echo of an Age stated but not shown to be Heroic whose literature carries neither primitive insight nor civilized assurance." (and more) The general funniness of things, even though occasionally mean.

Certainly an amusing and interesting angle from which to consider a great writer.

Always Diverting
Amis's letters are a lot of fun, as you might expect. Amis is often as outraged and funny as in his best fiction (especially in the letters to Larkin). Often in literary appraisals he is acute, and he always seems true to something in himself, so that even when one disagrees--i. e., T. S. Eliot is not simply a pretentious bore--one goes along.

Good as this correspondence is, it isn't up to Larkin's letters because Amis doesn't believe or feel as deeply as Larkin does, nor does he have as focussed a perspective as Larkin, so the humor isn't set set off in such sharp contradistinction to a fundamental seriousness. Yet you keep reading because the book clears away cant and intellectual fustian so vigorously. Moreover, it gives just enough glimpse of Amis's biography: a sad, messy counterpoint spreads out in the background: the meanderings of a brilliant man with a zillion reactions and nothing firm to attach them to.

Larkin's parody of his own poem "Days" on page 1040 is not to be missed; it's in one of Leader's helpful footnotes.

This book weighs a couple of pounds, so is hard to hold--to be read at table rather than in bed. Couldn't the publisher have used lighter weight paper and given us smaller type and less margin?

Rage & Glee
Volumes of letters should be judged by their editing as much as their content, hence the five stars. Z. Leader is thorough, intelligent, impartial, and exact. There is sufficient scholarly apparatus to guide the working academic and the demanding lay reader. As for the letters, well, there are a lot of them. Despite his professed laziness, Amis cranked off an immense amount of smart, thoughtful, scurrilous, and funny correspondence in the 50+ years recorded here. Exemplary funny bits are on pages 276-277 in a 1952 letter to Philip Larkin. If you laugh, buy the book. If you don't, don't. If you're shocked by cruel, rude jokes between close friends, don't. Amis demanded, and often provided, hard thinking, precise expression, and blunt honesty. His staunchly conservative, sometimes reactionary, views contrast interestingly with his drunken philandering, which should provoke thought among those readers who enjoy thinking at all. ... Read more

Book Description
Over 25 years ago, Kingsley Amis wrote TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU, a comedy about a lusty young couple, Patrick and Jenny, each engaged with equal ardor in gaining an opposite goal -- he with getting her into bed, she with staying out of it. They both win.

In DIFFICULTIES WITH GIRLS, Jenny and Patrick are back with us. They're older, though not much wiser -- Jenny, devoted but aggrieved; Patrick, boozing and unfaithful. Each lives in a fantasyland projecting life through lenses not calibrated in this world.

"To have said so much about the human condition with such wit and humor is an extraordinary achievement ...even for Kingsley Amis." (The Sunday Telegraph, London) ... Read more