Kingsley Amis | Thornfield Hall

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.

Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is one of my favorite academic satires. But the critic Patricia C. Spacks lambasted Lucky Jim as unfunny when she reread it for her book, On Rereading. Well, she is a professor emerita, and perhaps didn’t care for the caricatures.

Not being an academic, I have no problem with the ridicule of university life (which I loved, but still, it is funny). I always identify with a good anti-hero, and find the bumbling Jim Dixon endearing and goofy: I think of him as the adult counterpart of Holden Caulfield, only with much more common sense.

Jim teaches medieval history at a provincial university and despises academic scholarship, especially the article he is trying to write, “The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485.” And so he alienates a lot of people (accidentally). But this all turns out much better than you would think!

I somehow didn’t get around to Amis’s other books until recently, except for the Booker Prize-winning novel, The Old Devils, which is a dark comedy about a group of old (and I mean very old) friends who are retired in Wales. But last week I decided to catch up with some of the Amis books on my shelf. Ending up is by far (so far) the most impressive. But let me interject that I did not understand where this was going for the first fifty pages or so.

I thought this was a charming Barbara Pym-ish comedy about a group of old people who decide to share a cheap house in the country. How practical, I thought, and how sweet. And it is true that there a sweetness about the conscientious, unlovable Adela, who spends much of her time running errands for housemates and organizing occasions like Christmas.

The other characters are decidedly less sweet. Her raging brother Bernard is a former drunk who has liver problems and a penchant for vicious practical jokes His former boyfriend, Shorty, with whom he hasn’t had sex in 30 or 40 years, is more or less a servant, and resents Adela and their self-absorbed housemate, Marigold, who spends most of her time writing letters. The most neglected is their bedridden friend George, a former history professor who had a stroke and nowhere else to go. With the exception of Marigold, who has children and grandchildren, the inhabitants of Tuppeny-hapenny Cottage are on their own.

Whether or not you like this kind of dark comedy, Amis is a superb writer. Every sentence is gorgeous, graceful, and buoyant to the point of bounciness. He really delves the depths of these not on-the-surface very complicated people. In the following passage that describes the very ordinary but heartbreaking life of Adela, who has never had a friend.

Her career in hospital catering, taken up after she had been told, without further explanation, that she was not the right type to become a nurse, had brought her into contact with thousands of people until her retirement in 1961. None of them had become her friend, in the sense that none had agreed to go to a theatre or a coffee-shop or a sale with her more than a couple of times, and so she had lived alone throughout her working life. Now, after Bernard had made his astonishing offer, that she could housekeep for him and Shorty, she was among people and, with all the difficulties this seemed inevitably to bring, happier than at any time since her childhood. Her only fear was of falling helplessly ill and having nobody to leave in charge…

Very sad… and but for the grace of God… This grim comedy is a masterpiece, with a shocking and sudden ending.