The writing in [Jake's Thing] is determined throughout by Jake's manner of speaking, and it has all the virtuosity of Amis at his comic best, though there are those who will be offended by its strain of hostility and contempt. The prose is ultra-conversational, abusive, and yet allusive, too, and elegantly syntactic….
The description of [Jake's neighbor] Geoffrey has a … significance which relates to the underlying tensions of the present book. Here is a backward-looking chap forwardly using oaths which would not have been printed before the Second World War. The oaths used by the recent young, and the spirit of an age whose student activists mail him a plastic phallus, don't appeal to Jake, but the old oaths do. His swearing and womanizing form part of a liberation, in other words, but it has been overtaken by another that he can't abide…. The main question that emerges here, for a consideration of the book, is how far its attack on the new, 1970s permissiveness is also an attack on the freedoms which have made Jake what he is.
Mr Amis fastens reproaches on a character who will not always wear them, being, if you like, too likable, and some are reproaches which the novel tries to discredit. When Jake calls himself a male chauvinist, we might wonder whether this is another of its attacks on the kind of people who use that expression, which is one of the new oaths…. The novel could be read as that of a writer who is saying (later in life) that promiscuity is bad, after all, that male lust conceals indifference or dislike, and that desire and affection, desire and knowledge, are very different. But [Jake's wife's] argument that people's sex-drives keep them steady is important to the book, and it is not an argument that supports such a reading, since it implies that sex-drives can work with other sorts of drive, and that men and women have a good deal in common. Nor does Jake himself wholly support such a reading. So little has he resembled someone who is unable to feel affection for women, so easy is it to see him, at the same time, as a character in a licentious book, that only the politically motivated will be quite happy to treat his confession as a snub to the licentious behaviour in Mr Amis's earlier fiction, as the permissive society's mea culpa.
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Amis, Kingsley 1922–: Critical Essay by Karl Miller Access Pass.
