John Wain and Kingsley Amis, whose first novels, "Hurry on Down" and "Lucky Jim," came out the same year, 1953, formed the most considerable part of the not particularly well-named Angry Young Man group in postwar English letters…. [Both] have been quite versatile and complete writers in that they write excellent poetry and criticism along with their novels and short stories. (p. 14)
[But they] are really very different sorts of writer. Mr. Amis's talent is comic and corrosive. His strongest links are with a black farceur such as Evelyn Waugh, the Waugh of "Vile Bodies," "Decline and Fall" and "Put Out More Flags," before he made his run at respectability in "Brides-head Revisited" and the war trilogy. By contrast, John Wain as novelist seems serious, solid and even a little dull, in that special English way, which is actually reassuring rather than merely boring. One thinks of Arnold Bennett … or of the later, tamer Wordsworth, who yet could rise to the sober magnificence of the sonnet on mutability, a poem Mr. Wain very much admires. The promiscuous woman guitarist in "The Pardoner's Tale" says there are two kinds of attractive men: sexy ones and those who are nice but slightly wet. Whatever Mr. Wain may be in real life, the persona he projects in his fiction is usually more nice than sexy.
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