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Lucky Jim (Penguin Classics)
: I never laugh out loud while reading, but this book had me in stitches. People were looking at me on the bus... This book will not disappoint you!
Kingsley Amis is not, in my opinion, one of the greatest comic writers - that distinction is split between P.G.Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh - but in "Lucky Jim" he matches anything written by these two masters. It is laugh out loud funny, and precisely written to wring the utmost humour out of a mannered economy of words - it is no coincidence that Amis went on to write a guide to English usage, "The King's English". This is a lesson in how to turn a simple plot into greatness.
While Martin Amis is indulging in egomania, he must know in his heart of hearts, his talent (even though it is formidable) will ever come close to his father's (Kingsley Amis) as is displayed in Kingsley's LUCKY JIM. LUCKY JIM is light and humorous, but has profundity in it, too, and is a brilliant novel. The language is poetic and highly literary, but at the service of the story. A lot of "literary" writing buries the story, (Well, like in Martin Amis's stuff, for instance), but LUCKY JIM has wonderfully poetic sentences, that, even if you did not notice their poetry, serve a reader who would only need the sentences for their furthering of the narrative. There is not a single word wrong in this novel. It's perfect down to the last syllable. And I know I'll read it again sometime, and parts of it numerous times. It's not called a "classic" for nothing.
 When I first read this twentieth century classic, I said to myself: "Am I missing something here? This is the work of one of England's angry young men? Now I'm one of the angry ones." It took a BBC series to bring the characters to life in a way not immediately clear to me on the written page. Putting the words on video greatly increased my sympathy for Jim. Nonetheless, I think son Martin Amis did a funnier job with a similarly self-absorbed, self-centered slob in "Money: A suicide note". While I can see where son Martin found and derived his inspiration, I found less humor and little insight from the father. Lucky Jim Dixon is often more loathesome than likeable. His own sense of humor -- childish practical jokes of revenge on his enemies -- is more petty and mean than inspired. He doesn't much care for his students (except perhaps the pretty girls), his colleagues, or (for better reasons) his "superiors". Reading "Lucky Jim", I pictured a young Peter O'Toole or perhaps Hugh Grant drinking and stumbling his way through a good job, more concerned about his cigarette and beer budget than anything intellectual, romantic, noble, or heroic. Other than his contrast to the even more boorish son (Betrand) of Dixon's superior, it is still hard to understand the basis for the lucky outcome that concludes the book. Lucky for Jim, not just his students that, Dixon found another career.
Was there ever a novelist as consistently funny as Kingsley Amis? And was there ever a novel as funny as Lucky Jim? Read this book and you'll know why critic William H. Pritchard named it one of the five funniest books written this century (along with Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall and Anthony Powell's From a View to a Death). No one was better than Amis at mercilessly skewering phonies and mocking the affected, and here his targets not only include academics and academic life, but the artistically pretentious, the enforced boredom of dinner parties, "Art with a capital 'A'," any male over the age of thirty with facial hair, the tendency of academic women to dress like peasants, "filthy Mozart," and--in case he missed anyone--Modernism in general. With targets like these, how could one not enjoy the book
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