Everyman in America

...Because this is so common a problem, Amis' solution to it is of some interest...

...In Amis' next considerable novel, Take a Girl Like You—his I Like It Here was more of a travel sketch than a complete work of fiction— the theme of a breakdown of conventions is carried further...

...Reviewed by ANTHONY HARTLEY Contributor, "Encounter" To choose a novel by Kingsley Amis as one's book of the year so early in 1964 has an appropriateness which is not merely dependent on the quality of the book itself...

...But there is evidently a bad side to this process as well as a good one, and in Amis' next novel, That Uncertain Feeling, it is dealt with faithfully...

...Whether he will be able to develop fresh values of his own remains to be seen...

...But neither can he accept Welch without surrendering his own values which, incidentally, have rather more validity in the cultural field than those he is constantly denouncing...

...Indeed, it is his failure to understand the world around him which is responsible for the final debacle...

...His new novel can superficially be said to be about Anglo-American relations: that side of them which can be summed up in the phrase "You're British/American, but I like you, you bastard...

...Therein perhaps lies a misunderstanding...

...But throughout this novel there are overtones of change and decay...

...Jim Dixon's campaign against Professor Welch is worked out in terms of farce, but it contains an important psychological truth...

...Roger Micheldene, an English publisher, tries to continue in America an affair with the wife of a Danish professor which he has begun in Europe...

...Roger Micheldene is certainly not master of his fate...

...Neither husband nor wife can use the protective veil of social forms to save face in front of each other...

...Various broken-down figures hover in the wings...

...It is now 10 years since Amis published his first novel, Lucky Jim—a book whose hero has become proverbial—and the appearance of One Fat Englishman therefore provides the occasion for reassessment of a writer who has been thought to be especially typical of postwar Britain...

...Here again the social observation is so excellent, the manners and speech of a Welsh town so well noted, that it is tempting to regard this as the novel's be-all and endall...

...The scenes between Lewis and his wife after the discovery of his marital infidelity are among the most powerful that Amis has written...

...It has been Amis' fate to have the social significance side of his writing emphasized at the expense of the more personal themes which run through his novels...

...In fact, it is a mistake to be led by Amis' accurate observation of society into thinking that he is primarily a novelist of social observation...

...That solution is humor...

...He is, however, unsuccessful: American circumstance and his own irascible egotism come between him and Helene, and his humiliation at the break-up of the liaison is symbolized by her taking off for a weekend with an American author he particularly dislikes...

...If he does, he will simply be biting off his own nose to spite his face...

...Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer, wishing his lectureship to be renewed, cannot openly express the scorn he feels for Professor Welch, his official superior...

...One Fat Englishman is a novel which makes a very considerable impact...

...Patrick, in the intervals of boyish charm and boyish cruelty, has visions of death...

...But the consummation devoutly to be wished takes place when Jenny has had too much to drink...

...For all his clowning, Jim Dixon manages to assert his individuality against a hostile environment, a background of nagging pettiness...

...Again, the novel ends on a note of blank unhappiness...

...If Amis has turned the basic themes of Lucky Jim inside out in his later books, the economy of his writing and the accuracy of his description and dialogue have only increased with time...

...The main theme of That Uncertain Feeling is the old one of a breaking marriage and the sheer, blank unhappiness which love turned sour can cause to both parties...

...Lucky Jim, for instance, set as it is in a university and containing as its principal villain an appallingly devious professor of history, has often been taken as an attack on universities and professors in general, though nothing could be further from Amis' real views...

...The optimism which was certainly present in Lucky Jim— the belief that money can buy you something or that sex can be purely pleasurable—has disappeared, leaving behind a soured world in which the most that can be achieved is a minimum unhappiness...

...It is also a criticism of him, although the reader's sympathy is skillfully invoked alternately for and against Micheldene...

...What is essential is the free mind...

...This dilemma is very much one of the modern world...

...instead of defiance, deceit...

...This time the unhappiness begins before marriage...

...It is the dilemma of any individual living under a political regime which he finds tyrannical, but has no chance of overthrowing...

...One Fat Englishman is not really about Anglo-American relations (if it were, one's conclusion would be that neither side emerges from the battle very well), but it does throw into sharp relief the immutably English nature of the Amis hero...

...The unhappiness will not be great, but it will be there—badness and goodness in Amis's world are always the result of a carefully adjusted balance...

...By placing his hero in an American environment, Amis has completed the failure of his hero's control of circumstance which began to appear after Lucky Jim...

...It is the dilemma of any citizen faced with an obstructive bureaucracy...

...There is also a dose of farce à la Jim Dixon, but this clashes with the more serious parts of the book, and John Lewis, its hero, hardly needs to assert himself—everyone is quite nice to him, he gets taken up by the local nobs and, what is more important for the story, by the local nobs' wives...

...At present, the preoccupations which are to be found in his novels add up to a dark picture of the universe, the rout of 20th century ethics...

...It is the dilemma which faces anyone with a superior whom he can neither get rid of nor support...

...The final stage of this process can be seen in One Fat Englishman...

...It is a portrayal of that rather desperate personal situation in which everything is out in the open, but no real catharsis has been achieved...

...The book's plot is simple enough...

...Yet what is really going on is something rather different, something which is a rather more constant theme of Amis' fiction than transatlantic difficulties...

...An old man says what it is like to be old...

...From being the master of his environment, the Amis hero has become enslaved to it...

...Essentially, the trouble is that both Lewis and his wife are too naked...

...For the time being, he remains one of the most interesting of contemporary English writers as well as a monument to the avatars of the Puritan conscience...

...Instead of revolt, there is the grimace...

...Though everything is patched up at the end, the mending is not convincing...

...Lucky Jim thus represents a humorous assertion of the Amis hero's personality, a freeing of himself from social ties...

...He is that, of course, but not only that and not always in the way most frequently noticed by his critics...

...Moreover, the Amis hero's disregard of convention and of other people's feelings when presented in terms of a bitter prejudice against foreigners, appears as simply objectionable rather than as a gesture of revolt...

...and the lack of conventions in the Amis hero's world, his impatience with the normal social hypocrisies, works destructively for all concerned...

...We are left feeling that she may marry Patrick, but that she will never forgive either herself or him...

...Lucky Jim has as its main situa tion the relationship between Everyman and someone whom Everyman has to like or at any rate tolerate in public...

...Patrick Standish, an English suburban schoolmaster, pursues Jenny Bunn, his colleague, to a not entirely unexpected conclusion...