Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim may be the greatest academic satire of all time, and he won the Booker Prize in 1986 for The Old Devils. I recently discovered his 1988 comic classic, Difficulties with Girls, another splendid showcase for his mordant wit.

This loosely-structured satire skewers the publishing business, modern poetry, marriage, adultery, psychiatry, and sexual hypocrisy. The protagonist is Patrick Standish, a hard-drinking Latin teacher who wakes up with a hangover after a party only to learn from his headmaster that that he’d been offered a job by Simon Giles, director of a publishing house. A pity Patrick has no idea what he said about the future of books, but it doesn’t matter: after a short time at his new job, he is convinced that only about six writers on their list should have been published, mocks all the poets, and effortlessly edits a series of dumbed-down short histories.

The novel is set in the 1960s in London, when the parties are lively, crowded, and full of famous drunks. At one publishing party, Patrick’s lovely, smart wife Jenny is keen to see what poets are like. “Is that girl’s poetry any good?” she asks.

“Vera’s. Christ, no. It doesn’t come any more perseveringly no-good than hers. I don’t know how she does it – she must go over it word by bloody word, ready to pounce on any evidence of thought or observation or feeling for words that may have crept in while her back was turned.”

Patrick is incisively witty, but he has a good heart. He is kind to his eccentric neighbors and his acquaintances at the pub. Still, his many character flaws make it awkward for his long-suffering wife. In addition to the drinking, he routinely has sex with women he dislikes, which is awkward when a neighbor – “Are you sure you’re not American?” he keeps asking her (his deadliest insult) – decides she is in love with him. Jenny chooses to ignore Patrick’s transgressions until he goes way too far.

When Patrick is not at the publishing company or the pub, he is with Jenny in their attractive flat, and their interactions with the neighbors are priceless. One of the weirdest characters is Tim, a strange man who shows up one day with questions about the water pressure and the furnace. He says he wants to rent one of the flats, though Jenny has doubts, and tells Patrick that Tim seemed “funny” to her.

It turns out Tim is very eccentric but does intend to rent the flat. He won’t tell them where he works, but he loves talking about therapy. Soon he confides that his psychiatrist told him he is “queer” and that his sexual repression is the source of his problems. Although Tim doesn’t have the faintest idea what gay men do in bed ( Jenny is incredulous until she gets to know him – he is naive or an idiot, or both), he leaves his wife on the basis of this psychiatric advice. And so Patrick and Jenny introduce him to their “queer” neighbors, Stevie, a former action star in films, and macho Eric, who supports him financially. The couple promises Tim a night on the town, which does not end well.

This is a well-wrought, hilarious novel. Why is it so funny? It meanders, but is utterly worth the meandering. It does have a center: how many compromises will save the Standishes’ marriage? I would say that Jenny is a saint, if she didn’t read aloud the passages Patrick had underlined in his copy of Tom Jones. He is humiliated that she realized he fancied himself a Tom Jones at 36, Difficulties with Girls may not be Tom Jones, but that is a good thing. Not that I don’t like Tom Jones. And perhaps this is Kingsley Amis’s Tom Jones.