Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim

Kingsley Amis's 1953 novel Lucky Jim is a book meant to make us laugh at the absurdities of many of the people that we make while at the same time assuring us that there the small and downtrodden can come out ahead. In this novel, he tells a tale that we all want to hear, which is that sometimes the good guys win just because they are the good guys.

Amis, born in 1922, has made his focus as a novelist the creation of a humorous but highly critical look at British society, especially in the period following the end of World War II in 1945. Born in London, England, he was educated at Saint John's College, at the University of Oxford and his first novel and the subject of this paper, Lucky Jim was a bitingly satirical story of an unheroic young college instructor.

The book influenced a group of British playwrights and novelists who were known as the Angry Young Men because of their rebellious and critical attitude toward postwar British society. Amis would take up the same themes and the angry tone in the 1955 That Uncertain Feeling and Take a Girl Like You, published five years later. His later books have actually been somewhat gentler, such as the 1986 The Old Devils, a humorous look at middle-class Welsh people and the 1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill, a satirical portrayal of middle age, retirement, and quirky family life. But in Lucky Jim the face that Amis turns to his readers is angry and defiant, although this is a defiance marked by a lack of cynicism, and the in-th

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th an insider and an outsider, in this case the university professor Jim Dixon who doesn't quite fit into the world of academe. He is a professor who hates teaching classes, which in itself does not make him unique, but he also is bothered by overachieving students, finds himself forced to write journal articles on topics he doesn't like, and ridicules the chair of his dept. He is in many ways what many academics would like to be but don't quite have the nerve (or alternately the bad manners) to do. Another way of viewing Dixon is not simply that he is an Academic Everyman, but that he serves as a proxy not just for academics but for anyone who is browbeaten by the people in their lives. Lucky Jim has been called by critics the funniest book written in the English language and one of the striking things about reading it is how well it has aged - which is a testament not only to Amis's writing abilities but his acute sense of the truth that lies under the particulars of the general. He is talking about the absurdities of English academia in this book certainly, but he is also talking about the more general foibles of anyone living in the Western world in the years after World War II, and with this book's focus on the unbearable way

Category: Literature - K