E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #89: Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim

E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #89: Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim

by Ernie on 14/02/08 at 1:00 pm

Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis (1954). This novel deserves to be on the list simply because it inspires the reader to literally laugh out loud, a simple pleasure that eludes the novel’s lead character in the repressed environment of his anonymous university. Amis’s superb combination of stylistic and situational humor has made this one of the great classics of 20th-century English fiction. However, it also lays claim to another distinction. David Lodge has suggested that it is the first of what we now call the “campus novel,” an entity distinct from the earlier, humorless college novels of hearty young men leading their eights crews to triumph at Torpids (following that thought, Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, which only just missed making this list, is an excellent satirical predecessor to Lucky Jim, though its prewar hyperbole, verging on pure fantasy and owing more to Wilde and Saki, would seem alien to the dreary, frustrated postwar world of Lucky Jim). After Amis’s novel, a great many American and British novelists penned stories that served to satirize and critique the complacent, disengaged, and pompous milieu of the university. Lucky Jim also served as one of the central books of the “Angry Young Men” (journalists dubbed the group based on Leslie Allen Paul’s autobiography, Angry Young Man, 1951, and John Osborne’s play sealed the deal), which included such lights as Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Philip Larkin (also part of “The Group”), John Braine, John Wain, and Alan Sillitoe.

It is also a generation-defining book, depicting the petty travails and frustrations of a lower-middle-class ex-serviceman, Jim Dixon, who finds himself adrift and listless in the enervating, unfulfilling, sexually-repressed, and constantly humiliating post-war university, until he . . . loses it, with the help of several doses of whiskey and sherry. Highly recommended.

Kingsley Amis One