Lucky Jim (New York Review Books Classics)

After finishing the brilliant and hilarious “Diary of a Nobody,” I made the brave decision to read another satirical British novel about a young lecturer of medieval history set in post-World War II Britain.

The main reason I chose to read this book is because as a kid growing up in a Siberian gulag, I had always dreamed of becoming a medieval history lecturer of British descent.

“Lucky Jim” produces the occasional moments of satirical genius, such as when the protagonist, who is oddly named Jim, fantasizes about becoming an art critic so that he can write negative reviews about his nemesis who is an artist.

The novel is very well written, showing a mastery for analogy and I am sure other literary devices that I am unable to name.

The novel’s main flaw is that its soap opera component involving a love triangle (or multiple love triangles, as it were) dominates the story, at times overshadowing the satire. Too many pages are devoted to relationships, love, human emotion and other insignificant and trite matters.

“Lucky Jim” is worth reading—especially if like me, you grew up in a Siberian gulag daydreaming about one day lecturing on medieval history and being British.

Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim" is a marvelously readable and hilarious book. It is my first Amis and I highly recommend it. It is very modern in feel, though written in the mid-1950's, and its humor, perhaps I should say humour, is priceless and ageless.

I was really looking forward to this classic. I expected a witty picture of post war English academia - perhaps a funnier version of Look Back in Anger. Instead I got a very shallow farce which I found painful rather than funny. I gave up fairly early - life is too short.

Recently. I read and reviewed (5 star) "Stoner" by John Williams. I decided to give the college teacher genre another go and settled on this. There is plenty of witty writing and plenty of people to savage, which Amis does expertly. However, Lucky Jim's plot narrative is very diffuse and character depth suffers as a result. Jim has many superficial interactions that seem to go nowhere, e.g. Jim's doomed "special subject" plans. On the other hand, Jim's important tangled emotional/love life is never given literary development. Rather, at the end of the book, a previously referenced character appears and "explains" all. It's a short book and shortly after I got a feel for Jim, it was over. I wasn't sure if I felt regret or relief by that.

I just got finished reading Catcher in the Rye again, first time in 45 years since high school. Both books have an unsympathetic self destructive lead character with no redeeming features. Both books have some insight into the human dilemma and Lucky Jim has some clever turns of a phrase, but over all I would not recommend it. If you have a personal grudge against British small college academia you might like this, in the same way that people rebelling against the church like books that bash the priesthood. I say get a copy of any Wodehouse if you want chuckles in a British setting and skip this.

I bought this book as a nostalgia trip, having read it in my teens almost fifty years ago.

It seems very dated now. Junior academics obsessed with sex and beer. Professors supporting their Victorian pretensions on the income of a wife of independent means. An improbable plot seems very puerile.

Don't go there unless your nostalgic memories are more accurate than mine.

After reading praise from both professional and readers' reviews I began my read with anticipation: I was going to be entertained whether I wanted it or not. Not so. I quit 3/4th of the way through — after checking to make sure I had ordered the right book. It was not for me.

This narrator spends the whole book niggling over a very small story--whether or not he ever gets into a certain girl's pants. A kiss provides a firestorm of indignation; that's how far the world have moved on since this was written. It might have been great in 1953; now it is tedious. Sorry, Kingsley.

This book has been enshrined as a classic of English social commentary for a very long time, so presumably many people have been amused by the do-nothing scholar/faker who can fall in a manure pile and come up with a rose. Why, though? Amis doesn't have the bite of Evelyn Waugh or anything close to the genius of Auden, but he's from their era, when upper-crusty Brits got pricey degrees and then spent the rest of their lives making fun of everybody else. Reading it now, you wonder why anybody ever found these people worth reading about. - Elizabeth Gunn, author, COOL IN TUCSON

Just sat reading this book because it was recommended by a friend as the funniest book he's ever read. I started it but lost interest. I really can't review it appropriately. My friend stands by his rating of the book as the funniest book ever. I can't seem to get into it, let alone finish it. Sorry.

This is a dreadful piece of writing. It is desperatly unfunny. A Book Club program on ABC TV thought it witty and perannially funny with chuckles on every page and laugh out loud moments. NO. They, on the ABC, must have been having a lend of themselves. The book has all the charm of mouldy damp wollen clothing and built up dirt and grease on the skirting boards. The dialogue never much gets above pathetic English small talk of forever saying 'Im sorry' or 'I hope I'm not interupting'. Eeek! Get on with it. The novel is dated - so nailed down to the late 1940's at a rural University as to never want to leave there. It is just not relevant anymore and I can't believe it ever was. Take this book out of print please!

Jim Dixon's reflection on old man Welch, the chair of the History Department at the provincial college where the novel is set: "How had he become Professor of History, even at a place like this? By published works? No. By extra good teaching? No, in italics."
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

British literary critic and novelist David Lodge notes how those of his generation who came of age in England in the 1950s, men and women mostly from lower-middle income families having their first real taste of educational and professional opportunity, felt more than a little unease with the attitudes and values of the prevailing cultural and social establishment. Novels like Lucky Jim really spoke to them: young Jim Dixon enters the world of academia and polite society and detests all the airs, posturing, snootiness, arrogance and pretense. Judging from the reviews and essays penned by British readers in the last few years, this Kingsley Amis novel continues to speak with power.

As an American, the novel also spoke to me with power; however, the power (and also the humor) is signature British – subtle and understated. For examples we need only turn to the first pages. The opening scene has Dixon strolling the campus with Professor Welch, chair of the history department, the man who will approve or disapprove Dixon’s continuing within the department beyond the current term. Welsh is fussing over a local reporter’s write up of a concert where he, Welsh, played the recorder accompanied by piano. The newspaper said “flute and piano.” Welch pedantically details the difference between a flute and a recorder as if he is David Munrow, as if his recorder playing and the concert amounted to a historical event in the world of twentieth century performance. Hey, Welch – nobody gives a fig! And a recorder is a fipple flute, so the reporter’s mistake is hardly a monumental blunder.

Dixon and Welch continue walking together across the lawn in front of a college building, “To look at, but not only to look at, they resembled some kind of variety act: Welch tall and weedy, with limp whitening hair, Dixon on the short side, fair and round-faced, with an unusual breadth of shoulder that had never been accompanied by any special physical strength or skill.” In addition to providing the reader with telling physical detail, likening the two men to a variety act initiates a recurrent theme carried throughout the novel: very much in keeping with English society, nearly everyone moves and speaks as if they are acting on a stage; in other words, acculturated to play a prescribed, set role. Incidentally, I’ve heard more than once how the British are such natural actors and actresses since they are trained to act beginning as children. And this play acting really heightens the humor, especially as Jim Dixon seethes with rage as he follows the script and, fueled by alcohol, seethes with even more rage as he rebels against the whole stage production. Very British; very funny.

Ah, rebellion! Jim Dixon is a rebel with a cause, his cause being life free of hypocrisy and stupidity. But, alas, much of his rebellion is a silent rebellion. We are treated to Jim’s running commentary of what he would like to say and like to do, as in, after listening to more of Welch’s prattle: “He pretended to himself that he’d pick up his professor round the waist, squeeze the furry grey-blue waistcoat against him to expel the breath, run heavily with him up the steps, along the corridor to the Staff Cloakroom, and plunge the too-small feet in their capless shoes into a lavatory basin, pulling the plug once, twice and again, stuffing the mouth with toilet-paper.”

Again a bit later Jim hops in the car next to Welch as the professor drives home from the college and Welch presses him on the prospects of his history article being published. Dixon’s reply is cut short when Welch nearly causes a multi-vehicle crash: “Dixon, thought on the whole glad at this escape, felt at the same time that the conversation would have been appropriately rounded off by Welch’s death.” And this is only for starters – many are the zinger launched at the world of academe. No wonder Amis received a rather cool reception by the English faculty at Cambridge in the years following the publication of Lucky Jim!

The humor escalates as Jim Dixon finds himself in a number of increasingly farcical and compromising situations, usually brought on, in part, by his own prankster antics and drinking, at such events as a stay, including obligatory singing, at the home of the Welches, a college sponsored dance and, finally, delivering a required public history lecture to a full house. Actually, the events prior to and during Jim’s grand finale lecture are the stuff of Monty Python. All told, the exquisite timing of Amis’ language and the string of outrageous quagmires Jim must face make for one comic novel.

However, it must be noted, the humor cuts deeper than the comic British novels of writers like P. G. Wodehouse. A prime example is Jim’s skirmish with Welch’s son Bertrand, a self-styled amateur artist. Events and emotions move apace until Dixon has developed his own relationship with Bertrand’s girlfriend Christine. Bertrand becomes progressively more infuriated at this unwanted development and at one point snarls into Dixon’s face: “Just get this straight in your so-called mind. When I see something I want, I go for it. I don’t allow people of your sort to stand in my way. That’s what you’re leaving out of account. I’m having Christine because it’s my right. Do you understand that? If I’m after something I don’t care what I do to make sure that I get it.” Oh, my goodness, a member of the wealthy, privileged class portrayed as a viscous, condescending, power-hungry scum.

Lastly, what would a novel by Kingsley Amis be without young ladies? Lucky Jim features two such ladies: Margaret and the above mentioned Christine. Margaret teaches history at the college, is rather plain and uses emotional blackmail to tighten her grip on menfolk; Christine is both attractive and connected to an uncle in high places. To find out just how far Margaret will go with her blackmail and how lucky Jim Dixon will be with Christine and her uncle, you will have to read this comic jewel for yourself.

When I described the difficult time I was having adapting to the academic world--an environment to which I have now been connected in some form or other for almost 18 years--a friend of mine gave me a copy of Evelyn Waugh's _Decline and Fall_ (1928) and one of Kingsley Amis' _Lucky Jim_ (1954). I would have no trouble relating to the characters, my friend said, and he was quite right indeed. The tradition of the campus novel seems to have bloomed in Britain in a way that it has not in the US. I have heard that instructors of Creative Writing in the States even encourage their students not to write about university life (while simultaneously encouraging them to "write about what they know"). I must say I have no idea why this is so. Countless examples in British literature (the two novels I have just mentioned among them; a few works by David Lodge also come to mind) prove that university life is fertile soil for fiction. It may be that writing about university life can easily go wrong. Imagine a college student writing about the parties he or she has attended, and doing so in a serious, pretentious tone. I believe, however, that the US needs a great campus novel. The task is just waiting for someone bold enough to tackle it.

_Lucky Jim_ is the story of James Dixon, a lecturer in medieval history who has just been appointed to an unnamed university. The protagonist is said to be a composite of the author and his friend Philip Larkin (yes, the poet, who also belongs to the group of postwar British authors now known as the Angry Young Men), to whom the novel is dedicated. Dixon is desperate to secure his place in the university, but at the same time he obviously hates the job. He has nothing but contempt for most of his colleagues, and he seems to merely tolerate his students. He is, at the same time, torn between two love interests: his colleague Margaret Peel, and the younger Christine Callaghan, who happens to be the girlfriend of his superior's son.

The action develops in a series of unfortunate events. Many of these are supposed to be comic, and while I was amused by them, I did not find them actually funny. _Lucky Jim_ is, from my experience, an accurate portrayal of the academic world, but my attempt to read it as a comedy was unsuccessful. My sense of humor may not be in tune with the author's. (Waugh's _Decline and Fall_ did make me laugh, by the way.) As we read the story, we wonder whether Dixon is going to "make it" or not, but neither outcome seems like a satisfactory conclusion for this particular character. Jim Dixon is an antihero. There is not much about him to like. I, for my part, cared about him, because I know his plight from experience, at least as far as trying to make it in the academic world is concerned. It is easy for me to see, in other words, how the academic world might turn someone into the worst type of cynic. I wonder, though, how readers outside of academia react to him. Keith Gessen points out in his introduction to the novel that part of the book's greatness lies in making the reader care about a rather discreditable character. The fact that _Lucky Jim_ is considered to be one of the greatest English novels of the twentieth century seems to attest to its universal quality.

One of the elements that I found most effective in _Lucky Jim_ is the way in which the author portrays hypocrisy. It is for this reason that I point to Luis Buñuel's famous 1972 film in the title of this review. One may argue that all social interaction requires a certain (healthy?) degree of pretense, but the academic world seems to produce incredibly high levels of deceit. So many people involved in it appear to care, appear to know, appear to strive for excellence. _Lucky Jim_ captures this with great accuracy. Perhaps we feel for Dixon because, while he may not be perfect, he appears to be more human than his colleagues. Deep down, his desire to be genuine may be what interferes with his attempts to succeed in such a phony environment.

I enjoyed _Lucky Jim_, but I feel that my reading experience would have been more satisfying if I had not tried so hard to read the book through the lens of comedy. Then again, maybe the topic is too close to my heart, and in order to laugh one needs to take some distance. While I may not read another work by Kingsley Amis, I do recommend _Lucky Jim_. I must say, however, that I found Evelyn Waugh's _Decline and Fall_ to be much more effective as a comedy.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the book!

I kept on reading and laughed exactly once. I slogged my way through hundreds of pages of boring prose about self-involved, whiney people. I did this because of all the glowing reviews from people who thought this book was funny.
I did not.
If you want funny then read P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters; or William Boyd, A Good Man in Africa.

This novel tells the story of a junior lecturer, Jim Dixon, as he attempts to secure his standing at the rural English university at which he teaches history. His strategy is to please Prof. Welch who controls the history dept. Dixon, however, acts carelessly and drinks excessively. Rather than ingratiating himself to Welsh, he offends him and his family and is forced into humorous contortions to attempt to make amends.

The novel also follows Dixon’s interactions with two potential love interests: Margaret, an emotionally draining fellow academic to whom Dixon feels some moral obligation; and Christine, the much more attractive girlfriend of Welch’s son.

The story culminates in one final lecture, attended by all the relevant characters, which may the last chance for Dixon to save his job.

Dixon is a nearly perfectly drawn character. He is virtuous while also being mean and petty. He believes in important things while attacking the trappings built around them. He is a conformist and a rebel and contains many other conflicting attributes put together so subtly and believably by the author that even Dixon’s most outrageously funny interactions appear natural. The other characters are also well written, and the dialogue is sharp and witty throughout. There are many, usually brief, stretches of description of the characters’ internal thought processes in social situations. It is sometimes flirty and fun, but sometimes it feels juvenile and tedious. Yet even this is easy to tolerate because it seems genuine for these characters to think and act in such ways.

Jim proves to be lucky at the end of the story in a way that is a little too neat, but forgivable.

I need to resist the temptation to find a great theme or message in a novel as highly acclaimed as this. It needs to be nothing more than it is: a very funny, extremely well-written and enjoyable novel.

Kingsley Amis' first novel is arguably his best and probably his funniest. While Lucky Jim is an amusing send-up of academia, it is also a wicked examination of sexual dynamics as they were evolving in the post-war world of the early 1950s. Amis generates laughs by dishing out example after example of the perennial inability of men to understand women. He is particularly adept at exposing the transparent shallowness of men -- but the likable man who is the novel's protagonist is never a total cad, and Amis pokes fun at men with such good humor that male readers can recognize a bit of themselves in his characters and laugh. (Female readers, I assume, will nod their heads knowingly.)

James Dixon is in his first (and possibly last) year of employment as a lecturer in the history department of a provincial college. Despite his position, Dixon is disinclined to do any work that might be considered academic. As he avoids preparing the "special subject" he is supposed to teach in his second year, his only concern is the number of pretty girls who will sign up for the class. Whether Dixon will be invited to return for his second probationary year depends upon his ability to keep Professor Ned Welch happy. Welch is the prototypical absent-minded professor, a model of the pretentious and dull academic, the kind of scholar to whom Dixon is incapable of sucking up, no matter how hard he tries.

Dixon begins the novel in a spotty relationship with Margaret Peel, a lecturer who is taking a paid leave after her unsuccessful suicide attempt (triggered by the news that, in her words, Catchpole was leaving her for his "popsy"). Despite Margaret's prim and earnest nature (quite the opposite of Dixon's), Dixon enjoys spending time with her as long as "the emotional business of the evening" can be "transacted without involving him directly." More to Dixon's liking is Christine Callaghan, the current girlfriend of Welch's son Bertrand, an untalented painter. But Bertrand is also having a go with Carol Goldsmith (behind the back of Carol's husband Cecil, another history department colleague of Dixon's). Bertrand is interested in Christine largely because Christine's uncle is Julius Gore-Urquhart, a wealthy arts patron who is searching for a private secretary, a position Bertrand covets.

Invited to spend a weekend with the Welches, Dixon makes a mess of it in an impressive variety of ways. He does the same at a dance and, finally, at a public lecture he has been invited to give on a subject ("Merrie England") dear to Welch's heart. Dixon spends the most of the novel mildly misbehaving while trying to sort out the relationships between the various characters as well as his own (mostly superficial) feelings about them. Should he stay with Margaret? Should he try to win Christine's affections? Should he punch Bertrand in the ear?

Amis was a master of understated humor enlivened by slapstick moments. He packed more wit into a single sentence that most comedy writers manage in entire chapters. Take this description of an incipient fistfight between Dixon and Bertram: "They faced each other on the floral rug, feet apart and elbows crooked in uncertain attitudes, as if about to begin some ritual of which neither had learnt the clues." Of course, the brief fight causes more damage to a china figurine than to either of the combatants. Among the many jokes Amis tells in Lucky Jim, my favorite is the formula for love: ignorance of the other person plus unsatisfied sexual desire equals love.

As obnoxious as Dixon can be -- he schemes and manipulates, he drinks too much, he hides the evidence when he burns his host's blanket, he's lazy, he hates everything -- Amis manages the astonishing trick of making the reader identify with him and root for his success. Unlike Welch and Bertram and many of the novel's other characters, Dixon is genuine. He isn't a snob, he's incapable of disguising his faults, and he's cheerily self-deprecating.

The New York Review of Books edition of Lucky Jim includes an entertaining and informative introduction penned by Keith Gessen, notable for its frequent quotations from correspondence between Amis and Philip Larkin. It's interesting to note the parallels in experiences and attitudes between the lives of Amis and Larkin and the fictional life of Jim Dixon. The introduction also provides context to the novel in its discussion of post-war England.

Set in 1950s Britain, Lucky Jim is a wonderfully comic, at times farcical, tale of a young man's quest for identity. The eponymous Jim Dixon is a lecturer in medieval history desperate to secure a position even at the provincial university where the story takes place. Beset by a neurotic girlfriend he never wanted and his tedious department chairman who rules his life, Jim is anything but lucky, falling victim to his own sensitivity to and sympathy with the former and his fear of offending the latter, impulses which involve him in a series of misadventures because he can't say what he really thinks and feels. Thus he seems trapped in a life going nowhere. Yet he is far from the suffering innocent. Jim's inability to speak what's on his mind involves him in lies, half-truths, and schemes that only create snares to trap -- Jim.

Enter young Christine and Bertrand, the odious son of the department chairman, and the game is afoot. Always amusing and often laugh-aloud funny, Lucky Jim is like Waugh's Decline and Fall, an ageless comedy of manners and situations that you would not hesitate to re-read. Highly recommended.

In the course of looking over the campus novels I have recently re-read Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. This is an early example of that genre, having been published in 1954 shortly after CP Snow's The Masters. However, its light-heartedness separates it from Snow's work and mark it as a forerunner of the more humorous and irreverent campus novels of the late 1950s to the 1970s such as Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People is Wrong and The History Man and David Lodge's Changing Places, as well as Mary Smetley's recent novel Lorenzostein: A Bizarre Tale of the Depravity of a Young Academic.

Jim Dixon, the protagonist, is a young lecturer in history in an unspecified English university in the Midlands in the early 1950s. Dixon is a relaxed sort who being put off by the cant and pretensions of his academic colleagues tends to mimic and deprecate them to himself. Much of the humour and the most endearing parts of the novel revolve around this aspect of Dixon's response to his academic setting.

Fearing that his contract will not be renewed, Dixon bows to pressure from his pompous departmental chair, Professor Welch, and agrees to give the end-of-the-term lecture on the topic "Merrie England." Unfortunately, he becomes drunk at the reception and inadvertently mimics the voice of Professor Welch, mocks him, and then passes out. He loses his job, but later wins the heart of the fair lass he has been pursuing, which is a minor plot element in the greater farce of Dixon's attitudes and behaviour. The other equally enduring episode in the novel is when Dixon becomes drunk at a party at Professor Welch's house, falls asleep while smoking, and burns his host's bedclothes.

In re-reading Lucky Jim I found the story line to be rather thin. However, the redeeming aspect of this novel is the portrayal of Jim Dixon as the straightforward and irreverent academic who is repulsed by the cant and pretension of his stuffy academic environment, and who cannot get himself to fit in no matter how hard he tries. His concealed hostility to it all and his bungling attempts to do what he thinks is required of him provide most of the humour. With this re-reading I was struck with how the character of the protagonist, Jim Dixon, resonated with that of Lorenzostein, the protagonist in Mary Smetley's recent novel of that name. It was interesting to see how a more contemporary treatment of the theme of not fitting into academia and of rebellion against cant and pretension was worked out.

Kingsley Amis' first novel is arguably his best and probably his funniest. While Lucky Jim is an amusing send-up of academia, it is also a wicked examination of sexual dynamics as they were evolving in the post-war world of the early 1950s. Amis generates laughs by dishing out example after example of the perennial inability of men to understand women. He is particularly adept at exposing the transparent shallowness of men -- but the likable man who is the novel's protagonist is never a total cad, and Amis pokes fun at men with such good humor that male readers can recognize a bit of themselves in his characters and laugh. (Female readers, I assume, will nod their heads knowingly.)

James Dixon is in his first (and possibly last) year of employment as a lecturer in the history department of a provincial college. Despite his position, Dixon is disinclined to do any work that might be considered academic. As he avoids preparing the "special subject" he is supposed to teach in his second year, his only concern is the number of pretty girls who will sign up for the class. Whether Dixon will be invited to return for his second probationary year depends upon his ability to keep Professor Ned Welch happy. Welch is the prototypical absent-minded professor, a model of the pretentious and dull academic, the kind of scholar to whom Dixon is incapable of sucking up, no matter how hard he tries.

Dixon begins the novel in a spotty relationship with Margaret Peel, a lecturer who is taking a paid leave after her unsuccessful suicide attempt (triggered by the news that, in her words, Catchpole was leaving her for his "popsy"). Despite Margaret's prim and earnest nature (quite the opposite of Dixon's), Dixon enjoys spending time with her as long as "the emotional business of the evening" can be "transacted without involving him directly." More to Dixon's liking is Christine Callaghan, the current girlfriend of Welch's son Bertrand, an untalented painter. But Bertrand is also having a go with Carol Goldsmith (behind the back of Carol's husband Cecil, another history department colleague of Dixon's). Bertrand is interested in Christine largely because Christine's uncle is Julius Gore-Urquhart, a wealthy arts patron who is searching for a private secretary, a position Bertrand covets.

Invited to spend a weekend with the Welches, Dixon makes a mess of it in an impressive variety of ways. He does the same at a dance and, finally, at a public lecture he has been invited to give on a subject ("Merrie England") dear to Welch's heart. Dixon spends the most of the novel mildly misbehaving while trying to sort out the relationships between the various characters as well as his own (mostly superficial) feelings about them. Should he stay with Margaret? Should he try to win Christine's affections? Should he punch Bertrand in the ear?

Amis was a master of understated humor enlivened by slapstick moments. He packed more wit into a single sentence that most comedy writers manage in entire chapters. Take this description of an incipient fistfight between Dixon and Bertram: "They faced each other on the floral rug, feet apart and elbows crooked in uncertain attitudes, as if about to begin some ritual of which neither had learnt the clues." Of course, the brief fight causes more damage to a china figurine than to either of the combatants. Among the many jokes Amis tells in Lucky Jim, my favorite is the formula for love: ignorance of the other person plus unsatisfied sexual desire equals love.

As obnoxious as Dixon can be -- he schemes and manipulates, he drinks too much, he hides the evidence when he burns his host's blanket, he's lazy, he hates everything -- Amis manages the astonishing trick of making the reader identify with him and root for his success. Unlike Welch and Bertram and many of the novel's other characters, Dixon is genuine. He isn't a snob, he's incapable of disguising his faults, and he's cheerily self-deprecating.

The New York Review of Books edition of Lucky Jim includes an entertaining and informative introduction penned by Keith Gessen, notable for its frequent quotations from correspondence between Amis and Philip Larkin. It's interesting to note the parallels in experiences and attitudes between the lives of Amis and Larkin and the fictional life of Jim Dixon. The introduction also provides context to the novel in its discussion of post-war England.

Initially I found this third Galaxy collection a little disappointing compared to the first two in the series, but as the stories progressed I enjoyed them more and more. I think that the collection just takes time to get going. It is well worth reading.

I do not know enough about science fiction to give detailed comments. I’m also concerned that in the detail I might give away too much of the storylines. My main motivation for reviewing is to give an easily accessible list of contents to those browsing through anthologies on the store.

Here is a list of the contents together with brief scene setting sentences:

(1) Limiting Factor by Theodore R. Cogswell
A small group of humans with unusual abilities intend to make a new life away from earth.

(2) Protection by Robert Sheckley
"I seem to be standing in the middle of the street talking to an invisible alien from the farthest reaches of outer space."

(3) The Vilbar Party by Evelyn E. Smith
First line: "The Perzils are giving a vilbar party tomorrow night, Professor Slood said cajolingly".

(4) End as a World by F.L.Wallace
"There it was in big letters, quoting from the papers: THIS IS THE DAY THE WORLD ENDS".

(5) Time in the Round by Fritz Leiber
Bloodthirsty five year old dreams of resurrecting world warfare.

(6) Help! I am Dr Morris Goldpepper by Avram Davidson
The Steering Committee of the American Dental Association meets to discuss a worrying message.

(7) A Wind is Rising by Finn O'Donnevan
Problems for two members of the Advanced Exploration Corps on Carella

(8) Ideas Die Hard by Isaac Asimov
The first manned spaceship heads for the moon. Classic story.

(9) Dead Ringer by Lester Del Rey
Blacklisted journalist is convinced aliens are among us.

(10) The Haunted Corpse by Frederick Pohl
The Pentagon has got wind of Dr Horn's Polycloid Quasitron.

(11) The Model of a Judge by William Morrison
Reformed alien predator is asked to judge a cake baking contest.

(12) Man in the Jar by Damon Knight
Ruthless earthman seeks to profit from discovering the legendary race of Maracks on the planet Meng.

(13) Volpla by Wyman Guin
The story of the creation of the Volpla and of their creator in sunny California.

(14) Honorable Opponent by Clifford D Simak
General Lyman Flood is waiting to exchange prisoners with the alien Fivers. "Earth had never taken such a beating". Simak is always worth reading.

(15) The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith
Wonderful classic story of telepathic battles and relationship in deepest space.

H.L. Gold, the editor, was a significant figure in 1950s science fiction. The following is taken from Wikipedia:

Horace Leonard Gold (1914 - 1996) is perhaps best known as a leading magazine editor during the post-WWII science fiction boom. In 1950 he launched Galaxy Science Fiction, which was soon followed by its companion fantasy magazine, Beyond Fantasy Fiction (1953-55).
With Galaxy Gold created a different kind of science fiction magazine by focusing less on technology, hardware and pulp adventures. Instead, he introduced themes leaning toward sociology, psychology and satire. He paid more than was common at the time and had the advantage that several talented authors had become alienated from John W. Campbell due to his enthusiasm for Dianetics.
Gold also edited several anthologies (1952-62) related to the magazine, but health concerns began to overwhelm him. Gold suffered from increasing agoraphobia (originating from war trauma), and as a result, retired from Galaxy in 1961 due to his health problems. He lived the rest of his life more or less in seclusion, though he published occasional short stories and guest editorials through the early 1980s.

...well, maybe the last two, but as others, notably Mary McCarthy, in The Groves of Academe have depicted, there seems to be nothing collegial about professional lives purportedly dedicated to the pursuit of higher knowledge. This is the novel that established Kingsley Amis' reputation, and remains his most famous work. Regrettably, rather late in life, it is the first work of his that I have read. If you like your novels with heroic characters, whose actions should serve as a role model for you, or your children, well, this novel is not for you.

The story is told from the point of view of Jim Dixon, a junior professor, in his first year at one of the newly opened provincial universities after World War II. He is the proverbial square peg being jammed into a round hole; he is neurotic, dysfunctional and alienated, as are most of the characters. Wartime austerity is slowly loosening its grip; he lives in a boarding house, and counts his cigarettes out, not for health reasons, but rather financial ones. Early on, we are introduced to one of the perennial curses of academic life: the "publish or perish" mantra. Plagiarism is the essential aspect of the denouement to that theme. The exigencies of organizational life, the need to impress one's superiors, and appear to be a good "team player," best expressed by a couple earthy epithets that would never make it past the censor, permeate the tale. Philandering, mainly of the unrequited variety, is also a dominant theme. As in other "drawing room" novels, the sexual and financial dynamics are omnipresent, and one "needs a scorecard to tell who the players are."

Amis has a fine ear for dialogue, and utilizes it brilliantly to draw and define his characters. The humor can be laugh out loud (LOL) hilarious. To mention one scene, Dixon is trying to obtain a straight answer for the History Chairmen, Welch, if he will be re-contracted for a second year. Welch bloviates, almost certainly unintentionally, about any subject but... the issue at hand. In another scene, one woman is nominally complimenting another, naturally a potential rival (aren't they all?) but Dixon knows what is coming, so he "...tensed himself for the inevitable qualification... `I don't like women of that age who try to act the gracious lady. Bit of a prig, too.'" One of the women plots to have Dixon "take out" a rival. Is the novel sexist? Well, for sure, the women don't come off very well, and it is the `50's, but the men are certainly portrayed "on an equal opportunity basis," that is, badly.

And there is the "trans-Atlantic" issue, and since it is all about "not getting it," perhaps the best way to describe the problem is the French phrase, "je ne sais quoi" quality of British humor. Even when I am playing "at the top of my game," I only seem to "get" about 80% of it, and I remain disconcerted that there is something deep, and intrinsic to the culture of the British Isles that I just don't understand. No doubt this is one of the reasons I found certain sections of the book a bit tedious. Still, there were numerous "takeaways" that shall linger long, from "diuretic coffee," to "aureole of choking nonsense," to "Yes, I know women are all dead keen on marrying men they don't much like."

This particular edition has an introduction by David Lodge. Among other matters, he compares the Amis with one of his contemporaries, Graham Greene, and in particular, his novel, The Heart of the Matter: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) It is worth searching for this edition just for Lodge's intro. Overall, a 5-star read, on the way academic life was, in Britain, in the `50's, and probably still is.

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.

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."

This early masterpiece of Kingsley Amis inspires such peals of laughter and raves of admiration that it will put you in a good mood for a week after finishing it.
Jim Dixon is a World War II vet who has somehow become a medieval history lecturer at a provincial English university. He worries about keeping his job and meanwhile loathes the self-absorbed pedant who will decide whether to keep him or not: "No other professor in Great Britain, [Dixon] thought, set such store in being called Professor." With the axe hanging over his head Dixon falls for the girlfriend of his boss's son, Bertrand. A ruthless social-climbing artist, Bertrand is one of the most intolerable snobs I have come across in literature. You will be impressed by Dixon's campaign for the lady Christine-- sometimes carried on as much to prick Bertrand as to win her affection. Dixon is a remarkably funny character, and part of Amis's genius is that we like him far more than we should. He starts off rather childish, spitefully penciling moustache and glasses on a face in someone else's new magazine. As the plot moves along at an increasingly rapid pace, we see the necessary defense mechanisms in his many contorted facial expressions and pseudo-polite manner. So often does fear or calculation lead him to think one thing and say the opposite that the moment when he first does say exactly what he is thinking will move you to stand up and cheer.
LUCKY JIM had me putting it down often--not in boredom or disapproval, oh my, no!--I just had to pause time and time again to laugh and recover, to let Amis's brilliance sink in--his deceptively calm tone, his nimble use of the language. Occasionally Amis will turn a giggle-inducing phrase in the style of P.G. Wodehouse, but most of his humor is the unavoidable belly-aching kind. Funnier than and just as sharp as Evelyn Waugh, Amis's influence can be seen--albeit in much wackier fashion--in the 1990s novels of Stephen Fry.
Not just a comic novel, this, but a work of true and timeless literary merit. We shouldn't forget that Amis has Dixon wrestle with a few demons that are not put down easily by anyone. But I guarantee it won't be chance that will have you rolling on the floor if you pick up LUCKY JIM.

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.

In the interests of full disclosure I must admit that I am something of an Amis fan. I do understand, however, that Amis is a bit of an acquired taste. There are some of his works that just aren't written to appeal to a mass market. This is not one of those.
Far and away Amis' most accessible novel, Lucky Jim deals in comic catastrophe. The hapless Jim Dixon a newly employed assistant lecturer in history at a small British university, attempts to settle in and make a good impression. He encounters one disaster after another. As events unfold, it's clear that Jim is anything but "lucky".
Not the least of his problems is his eccentric boss Professor Welch, but also contributing are a madrigal gathering at Welch's house, Jim's infatuation with Welch's obnoxious son's girlfriend, not to mention the obnoxious son himself, little wars with the other tenants at his boarding house, and the necessity to deliver a showcase lecture on "Merrie England." This latter requirement provides the setting for one of the funniest academic spoof sequences in all of English literature.
The book was first published in 1954 and some of the language--presented as colloquial in the book, is a bit dated. This doesn't really detract from the story--it really just add a level of quaintness. This is the only real criticism on can put forward, however.
This is satire of a high order as rendered by a master. Recognized as one of the 100 best books of the 20th century by whatever group of highbrows it was that put that out in late 1999. This is one that actually deserved to be on it.
Lucky Jim proves great literature need not be dull or depressing. This is a truly great read.

When it was first published in 1954, it turned the author, Kingsley Amis (the father of Martin, also a fine author), into a celebrated writer and a spokesman for his generation, a position that he didn't seem to want or care about. The novel was "Lucky Jim," and it tells the story of a young academic, Jim Dixon, at work in one of England's provincial universities. The book is hilarious, from the first page (where Jim describes the physical sensation of hangover) to the last, when he leaves the shady groves of academia for a job with better pay in London. Along the way, Jim learns a lot about academic life--he hates recorder concerts, musical evenings, and academic pretentions--and he learns a lot of girls; his main preoccupation.

I keep thinking this book is ripe for a movie version, with someone like Daniel Day-Lewis as the title character; it was made into a film in the 1950s, but I've never seen it and the reviews are not great. The book remains a delight to read, however, and, like all good satires, has some serious points to make, about things that Amis detected, like pretentiousness. "Lucky Jim" is also noteworthy because it launched Amis's career, and he wrote novels, short stories, poems, and journalism for the rest of his life, which ended just last year. He's a very different writer from his son Martin (rumor has it he didn't like Martin's work all that much), but they both share a real gift for comic writing. It is a work that achieves that rare combination of being interesting in a literary sense, but also humorous and a real pleasure to read. I recommend it heartily.

Those who come to LUCKY JIM by Kingsley Amis usually do so because thay have heard that it is a funny book. And so it is. But when one finishes and tries to analyze the source of the humor, one finds, somewhat surprisingly, that the hero Jim Dixon, drifts in and out of situations that construct backgrounds that are patently phony, mostly to the reader and only partly to Dixon himself. It is his reaction to all this encrusted phoniness that serves as the ideology that led to the existence of the Angry Young Men dogma that was then afflicting a post-war England. For Amis, humor was the means by which this frustration at not being able to do anything about it caused him and his readers to laugh at a society whose only saving grace was that what you saw was definitely not what you got.

Jim Dixon is a young college instructor, trying hard to fit in when he quickly realizes that he should not fit in but plows ahead anyway. Since he is non-tenured, his continuing employment depends on the good will of his department chair, Professor Welch, a man who argues that life ought to be unhampered by the restraints of a confining culture, but whose deeds shout out the contrary. Dixon is dating a younger colleague, Margaret Peel, a rather plain-jane type who inexplicably sees in Dixon the salvation to her own need to have free love without the responsibility to maintain it. At a party, he meets Welch's equally pontificating son, Bertrand and his date Christine, to whom Dixon is attracted. The humor of the novel resides in some slapstick scenes, a leading example of which occurs when Dixon falls asleep while smoking with predictable results--he very nearly burns down the guest room of the Welches in which he was staying.

Amis hints early on that his true reason to write LUCKY JIM was his dissatisfaction with the compacency that he saw as ossifying England. He deduced that far too much of England was an empty facade full of empty people performing empty functions. Jim Dixon himself lectures on topics of which he is ignorant but hopes that no one can see his lack. Professor Welch is much like himself, only on a higher level of incompetence. Both Dixon and Welch are involved in an equally spurious revival of folk art. When at the novel's end and Dixon is seen as "lucky" in the sense that he has a new job and a new girlfriend, the reader is puzzled what Dixon has done to deserve his luck. And that is the point. He has done nothing to be lucky, but he has had the sense to avoid the excesses that afflict the Welches. Jim Dixon is simply not ossified enough to avoid his luck. For him, coming in third in a four man race is good enough to win the top prize. For Amis, that was not good enough. LUCKY JIM tells the world that.

When I first read this twentieth century classic, I said to myself: "Am I missing something here? This is the work of one of England's angry young men? Now I'm one of the angry ones." It took a BBC series to bring the characters to life in a way not immediately clear to me on the written page. Putting the words on video greatly increased my sympathy for Jim.
Nonetheless, I think son Martin Amis did a funnier job with a similarly self-absorbed, self-centered slob in "Money: A suicide note". While I can see where son Martin found and derived his inspiration, I found less humor and little insight from the father.
Lucky Jim Dixon is often more loathesome than likeable. His own sense of humor -- childish practical jokes of revenge on his enemies -- is more petty and mean than inspired. He doesn't much care for his students (except perhaps the pretty girls), his colleagues, or (for better reasons) his "superiors". Reading "Lucky Jim", I pictured a young Peter O'Toole or perhaps Hugh Grant drinking and stumbling his way through a good job, more concerned about his cigarette and beer budget than anything intellectual, romantic, noble, or heroic.
Other than his contrast to the even more boorish son (Betrand) of Dixon's superior, it is still hard to understand the basis for the lucky outcome that concludes the book. Lucky for Jim, not just his students that, Dixon found another career.

Upon its 1954 publication, the British author Kingsley Amis's LUCKY JIM jumpstarted his career with a bang, won a lot of awards, was eventually translated into more than 20 languages, and has probably sold more than two million copies worldwide since. Amis's debut was originally reviewed critically, in the [London Sunday] Times by once very popular British author Somerset Maugham, who described its protagonist as being a member of a new class, "the white collar proletariat." Yet, among other awards, it eventually won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction. Amis was associated with the writers and playwrights labeled by the critics as the Angry Young Men; LUCKY JIM was one of the first British campus novels, which I suppose could be considered an extended coming of age novel.

The year in which the novel is set is never made explicit, but cannot be later than 1951. LUCKY JIM follows the eponymous James (Jim) Dixon, a northern, grammar-school and scholarship-educated, lower class young man, now a reluctant medieval history lecturer at an unnamed provincial redbrick English university. The midlands university is thought to be based in part on the University of Leicester, where the lifelong friend the author had made, while on scholarship at the famed prestigious ancient university at Oxford, British poet Philip Larkin, was a librarian. (The book is dedicated to Larkin, who is thought to have modeled the character Dixon, contributed to the novel's structure, and suggested some of the other more important characters.) At any rate, Dixon knows better than most that "there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones." The comic dynamic of the novel is Dixon's rebellion against the pseudo-intellectual pretension he meets in academic life, and the out of control escalation of this from private fantasy to public display. It seems a doomed trajectory, but Jim is 'lucky'; the novel ends with possession of a job that will grant him relative affluence, and the London life and girl he wants.

Sir William Kingsley William Amis, CBE (16 April 1922 - 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. The London-born writer received his education through scholarships. He wrote more than 20 novels, including That Uncertain Feeling,Take a Girl Like You and The Green Man . He was shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize three times and eventually won it for The Old Devils. The author also wrote six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism. According to his biographer, Zachary Leader, Amis was "the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century." He was the father of English novelist Martin Amis. In 2008, The Times [London] ranked Kingsley Amis ninth on their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Back when I was an intrepid girl journalist, I interviewed Kingsley Amis in his comfortable North London home. He fed me lunch, including preserves made by his wife at the time, British novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, and a nice white wine, and entertained me with a series of witticisms. I particularly remember his telling me that any edition of ROGETS THESAURUS later than 1931 was useless, as the English language had become so debased. As is well known, when the writer was aging at the end of this second marriage, he went to live with his first wife and her third husband, in a deal brokered by their two sons Philip and Martin, so that he could be cared for until his death.

Unspoken in the term `angry young men,' is proletarian, the underclass that British writers and playwrights ignored for centuries and finally discovered only in the 1950s, when audiences made their boredom with `drawing room comedies' noticeable at the box office. Anyway, this 60+ year old novel is, not so surprisingly, dated. And also, perhaps not so surprisingly, Dixon seems like a bit of a lout to me, albeit a funny one: he's definitely the Granddad of today's stoned slackers. Well, Jim Dixon, although a bit of a lout, is still funny today.

Jim Dixon is a young history professor who smokes too much and drinks too much. Put the two vices together and you have burned bedding in the home of Professor Welch, of the proverbial absent-minded variety, who holds sway over Dixon’s future. Dixon has also been known to pull the occasional harmless prank in the pursuit of a woman or to exact revenge for revealing one of his screw-ups or secrets. Dixon is drawn to two women. Margaret is not particularly attractive, but Dixon feels a certain obligation to keep her company after an apparent suicide attempt. Christine, on the other hand, is pretty and fun and becomes his accomplice in the bedding incident, but she’s the girlfriend of Welch’s unpleasant son, Bernard. I have to give Dixon credit for wisdom in not trying to force Christine’s hand by blabbing about Bernard’s affair with Carol, a married woman. In fact, Dixon has a number of commendable qualities, including being a decent judge of character and his ability to get in and out of some sticky situations of his own making. His antics make him seem much more like a student who may not graduate than a professor who may get the boot. Bear in mind, too, that this book was published in the 1950s, so that the humor is both retro and English. This is my first Kingsley Amis novel, but perhaps I should have gone for one of his later, more serious novels. For me, this one dragged, despite the terrific writing with lots of delightful metaphors and dialog that didn’t actually sound overly dated. For example, his description of Dixon’s hangover as feeling like “he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police” made me feel Dixon’s pain. And when he finally has to deliver his much-anticipated lecture on Merrie England, his nervousness and disorientation are palpable, and the mimicries are priceless.

Fifteen stories from the period 1956-8. There are some very strange items included int his one! If you don't collect the magazines, these Readers are a must-own.

CONTENTS:

I Am A Nucleus Stephen Barr

Name Your Symptom Jim Harmon

Horrer Howce Margaret St. Clair

Man of Distinction Michael Shaara

The Bomb in the Bathtub Thomas N. Scortia

Your Were Right, Joe J. T. McIntosh

What's He Doing in There? Fritz Leiber

The Gentlest Unpeople Frederik Pohl

The Hated Frederik Pohl (as Paul Flehr)

Kill Me With Kindness Richard Wilson

Or All the Seas With Oysters Avram Davidson

The Gun Without a Bang Robert Sheckley (as Finn O'Donnevan)

Man in a Quandary L. J. Stecher Jr.

Blank Form Arthur Sellings

The Minimum Man Robert Sheckley

For people who love a certain sort of England, post-war, depressive and near solipsistic - the England of Larkin and Bacon and Osborne - Lucky Jim will stand out as a great achievement; sabre-like humor slashing the pomposity of another sort of post-war England, soft, flatulant, conceited without much reason.
Amis' characters are juicy and he is as violent as Wyndham Lewis but more gripping. It will be a rare reader who doesn't escape the odd thrust at his own expense but he should emerge at the end more smiling than wincing, I did. It's only if you have high and mighty principles that you'll really be for the chop. Principles, that is, unallied with genius: a situation that is not discussed in this book.
He never lets us lose sight of the important things in life: money and sex, and ultimately his hero is rewarded with both. To qualify that: it's all about the right sort of money and the right sort of sex too, money for independence and comfort (especially of the alcoholic sort) and sex with an attractive sensible girl. It's difficult to argue with logic like that.
But all that steady, grounded, laudable stuff is well and good. It's set against a great plot, wonderfully stage-managed that ends with the lecture on Merrie Englande, a literary crescendo of embarrassment as memorable, in its way, as Ravel's Bolero is in another.
Much to be recommended to graduates thinking of doing brainy stuff.

No wonder this book is deemed a "Classic." James Dixon is a 20th Century everyman. Poor beleaguered James Dixon. With his academic career hanging on a thread, not-so-lucky Jim has to kowtow to his witless superior and his witless superior's hugely annoying wife and equally obnoxious son during a weekend get together. From there, everything goes downhill fast for Dixon. But out of Dixon's dilemma comes wonderfully comic moments as he attempts to extracate himself from a bad situation. Amis creates wonderful, quirky but believeable central characters (and secondary) and Dixon's hilarious internal dialogue kept me laughing out loud -- I should think we can all relate to Dixon's thoughts (rude, catty, cynical, nasty, incisive, mocking, witty and insecure by turns) as we routinely censor what we will say aloud. There are so many terrific moments in this book that I immediately re-read it so as to savor them all over again.

Kingsley Amis has a brutally acidic wit and he has never employed it to greater effect than when he penned "Lucky Jim". For anyone in academia who has ever suffered through the nauseating condescension of a "venerable" colleague or for any reluctant guest who has ever peered in bewilderment at "the smallest drink they had ever seriously been offered", this book is an absolute joy.
It's worth reading this book beside a mirror: Amis' wonderfully, ludicrously specific descriptions of Dixon's facial contortions during moments of irritation will have you twisting your countenance in the most extraordinary way.
For me, though, it's the minor characters that really compound this book's status as an all-time classic. Atkinson, Dixon's partner-in-crime when it comes to winding up Johns, the oboe-playing sycophant, is a marvellous figure, whilst Michie's respectful yet slightly sneering insistence on learning more about Dixon's special subject is beautifully done.
The scene in the final chapter in which Dixon, splashing at the ears in drink, tries and fails to cobble together a speech about "Merrie England" is a wonderful set piece, matched only in 20th century comic fiction (what I've read of it), for my money, by Augustus Fink-Nottle's address to the scholars of Market Snodsbury Grammar School in P.G.Wodehouse's "Right Ho, Jeeves"