SOURCE: "Pen Envy: The Baroque Obsessions of an Unpublishable Writer Character," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 30, 1995, pp. 3, 13.

In the following review, Eder lauds Amis as "dark, satirical and gifted with irascibility." However, he does find fault with Amis's lack of "inventiveness" and the aim of the author's satire.

The best-known male writers of Britain's postwar period wrote of a zero-sum island where rancor was the leading literary theme. The women writers, meanwhile, were beginning to find ways to move on: Iris Murdoch through pagan myth, Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald through different kinds of humor with a similar root in sadness.

In retrospect, perhaps "angry young men" was not quite the right term for John Osborne, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and their contemporaries. Anger carries the implication that it will change something; in their case it was more a matter of chained resentment. The chains were...