Disconcerting his readers has long been a speciality of Amis. Since Lucky Jim (1954) announced a talent for inventively comic writing, he has seldom been content to stay still. Even in that early novel, the memorable and splendid farce of the burnt bed-clothes and drunken lecture has to take its place alongside the developing relationship between Jim Dixon and the neurotic Margaret, where the writing is less assured and more tentative as the material is less scathing and more weighty. A disturbing co-existe...

In the following review of Lucky Jim, Ritchie, a travel writer, states that Amis created a revolutionary novel for the time by focusing on an ordinary man.