[Jake's Thing] is anti the Women's Movement. It's anti-Women's Lib, anti-feminist and anti-female. I can see nothing whatever sinister about being anti all those things, providing one doesn't hide these sentiments by dressing them up in a tatty little plot about what we all know are the lunacies of the sillier disciples of Masters and Johnson. When the scene shifts from Harley Street consulting rooms and the sleazy North London 'workshop' to Comyns College, Oxford … the plot improves slightly, for co-education seems to be a topic better suited to Kingley Amis's barbed pen than is coitus. And the real comic tour de force of the book is the scene where Jake puts on academical dress and raises a glass of sherry in his hand in front of the windows of his college rooms: he is posing for his photograph to be taken by the foreign tourists who have been in hot pursuit of a genuine don. That rings a great deal truer than all that Amisian waffle about 'genital sensate focusing', which sounds anyway like it has come straight from a clinical guide, and would be quite funny enough on its own—funnier than when it's endowed by Amis with indignity.
There is, in Jake's Thing, something that is new though; a gritty, tough and difficult style of writing, that is sustained through the whole book. A refined stream-of-consciousness manner informs the whole of the narrative, and Amis has got it very nearly perfectly right, so that Jake's Army obscenities—the genuine contents of his thoughts—contrast comically with the conventionally polite words he actually utters. Technically very well done—I wish it had been more worth doing. (p. 8)
Paul Levy, in Books and Bookmen (© copyright Paul Levy 1978; reprinted with permission), October, 1978.
This is a free excerpt of 292 words. There are 296 words (approx.
1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Amis, Kingsley 1922–: Critical Essay by Paul Levy Access Pass.
