A Tough Act to Follow

...But now, in The Green Man (Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 253 pp., $5.95), a book which at first seems a strange choice for him, Amis is back at the top of his form...

...When one gives it some thought, however, it is really not odd at all that a writer whose first and best book was something of a fairy tale should now be turning to a ghost story...

...On a visit to Cambridge, Maurice casts a jaundiced eye at the slogans chalked on ancient walls: "communalize college estates, nude lie-in girton 2:30 sat., exams are totalitarian...

...When the devil (a model of older well-shod Cantabrigian elegance whom Amis may perhaps also mean to be God) appears for a chat with Maurice, he advises him impatiently "not to listen to that posturing idiot Sonnenschein making me out to be a sort of suburban Mao Tse-Tung...

...so closely resembling a blend of cold chalk soup and alum cordial . . . being peered and sniffed at, rolled round the shrinking tongue and forced down somehow by parties of young technology dons from Cambridge or junior television producers...

...To his particular wasteland Lawrence brought an aggressively clear, if sometimes nagging originality...

...Jack Wolstenholme wants to write poetry but must work in a bicycle factory...

...Amis can make sex at once exhilarating and excruciatingly ridiculous—no small feat in a time when sex and sexuality have been taken over by a nattering army of solemn, sober liberators wearing the starchy smocks of technical advisers and scientific researchers...

...Almost alone among today's novelists...

...Expert comedy is always the hardest act to follow...

...At the very beginning, quoting a motoring guide that disapproved his inn's white Burgundies, Maurice retorts: "The point about white Burgundies is that I hate them myself...

...When the Reverend Mr...

...He had met Lawrence, an old boy of the school, in 1930, the year he died, a meeting which seemed, in many ways, to have shaped his life...

...Stranded in the fastness of Lawrence's industrial north, the youths yearn for Oxbridge and London in the way Chekhov's sisters yearn to go to Moscow...

...In the midst of the elaborate Gothic contrivances of The Green Man—grave-robbing, necromancy, hypnagogic visions, evil-smelling 17th-century manuscripts, phantoms—Maurice doggedly makes all kinds of complicated moves to set up an orgy for himself, wife, and mistress...

...Her work has the tired stamp of predictability that has marred so many English novels since Lawrence drew the map and identified the swamps of despond in that eviscerating industrial and moral landscape...

...He read D. H. Lawrence . . . with a fire and love they could not resist...

...An Amis orgy, like the Amis hyperbole and so much of this book, is a brilliantly convincing double-backed beast— as completely preposterous as it is both touching and profound...

...In the 18 years since the irrecoverably perfect pleasure of reading Lucky Jim for the first time (I reread it every few years, the way some people go back annually to A Christmas Carol to make sure they will feel properly seasonal), I have often wondered why Amis' first novel became for me the infallible touchstone not only for comic novels but a good deal of serious contemporary fiction as well...

...Rose wants to paint...

...Women, as always, fare the worst in Amis' hands—or rather, a particularly poisonous specimen of modern woman, narcissistic, sexually misguided, a busy-mouthed destroyer of men like Maurice, who are decent and impeccably well-mannered in their promiscuity...

...For all the lyrical precision and ardency of its telling, Miss Elliott's modest story in the end is almost as drab as the northern backwater her young men and women are aching to escape...

...Like most Amis heroes, Maurice is an endearing, lecherous mess whose life is constantly in threat of falling to pieces, and whose most trival thoughts are full of marvelous bile about all the trendy things that torment these men, with their uncanny scent for fake sensibility and high-style hokum...

...With the magic setting-to-rights of a fairy tale, the incompetent but howlingly irreverent Jim Dixon finally slays all the wicked stepmothers and fire-eating dragons —got up as moth-eaten, fraudulently arty chairmen of university departments, ball-breaking lady academicians lethally adept at emotional blackmail, and a deadly comic horde of fifth-rate, recorder-tootling, madrigal-singing snobs and nincompoops...

...The middle-aged-boyish rector in the town, unforgettably named Tom Rodney Sonnenschein, is a modish fire-eating radical given to such ministerial remarks as "Quite frankly, the Jesus of the Gospels can be a bit of a wet liberal, when he's not taking off into flights of rather schmaltzy Semitic metaphor...

...In time, Herbert, the idol-mentor, is revealed to have decidedly nasty feet of clay and commits suicide...

...Yawning through other men's books, I have sometimes felt that the long-winded sobriety of much modern-day fiction could be summed up thus: A very few novels are good, most are awful wastes of time, but nothing will ever compare with Lucky Jim...

...Sonnenschein is asked seriously by Maurice to perform a service of exorcism, he exclaims: "You've got to be joking...

...When he finally gets everyone together, the orgy is a masterpiece of failed expectations, and one of the funniest accounts of sex I have ever read...

...Miss Elliott, some 40 years later, merely restates his by now wholly assimilated perceptions...

...Amis has written more than half a dozen books since Lucky Jim, none as exquisitely right and effortlessly funny, yet each has cast a flare of comic light over subjects he obviously takes seriously—modern marriage, personal ambition, sexual ethics, new-style wealth, and old-fashioned mediocrity...

...Parents and friends, halfhearted lovers and drab necessity, rub away the bloom on youth's dream of success and in a few years the provincial fledglings have learned that bitterest of lessons: "Maybe that's when you get there, when you stop wanting...

...Except for the best of Evelyn Waugh—but to me A Handful of Dust and Vile Bodies were about a vanished time in another country—no other 20th-century novel made me laugh so boisterously about the sacred cows of the academic liberal intelligentsia, and no jester has seemed to deserve such admiration for his snarling, deflating panache, redeemed by an unmistakable affection for his likable schlemiel of a hero...

...The Kindling, now published in the U.S...

...Amis has in fact long been fascinated by popular science fiction—by a future as unreal as the ghosts of the past—but his purpose in this new book is not mere entertainment...

...Recently, in One Fat Englishman and I Want It Now, his splenetic rage and contempt about a wide range of American and British piggishness of the 1960s seemed to cripple his wit and deflect the aim of his formerly unerring eye...

...Herbert Wolf held coffee evenings for the grammar-school sixth...

...I enjoyed seeing those glasses of Chablis...

...Their ardent, amorphous hopes and plans are sustained by a beloved grammar-school teacher who urges them on to their separate flights from the provinces...

...The narrator, Maurice Allington, is a well-educated innkeeper, a fiftyish, more sexually sophisticated, more doom-ridden blood cousin to the Lucky Jim of almost two decades ago...

...Despite the supernatural complexity of Tire Green Man, his subject is contemporary life, in all its ludicrous, clumsy dailiness, as the prey not only of death but of the more lacerating terror enshrouding each man's idea of death...

...In the end, Dixon wins not only the beautiful princess but the high rank and riches that come in her wake...

...What is missing altogether from The Kindling is a touch of that wild daring, that courage to take truly colossal chances even if they end in a pratfall, which makes the world of Kingsley Amis, in every one of his books, come alive with the inimitably distinct lineaments of singularity that so few novelists today deem important enough to attempt...

...His hyperbolic characterizations are instantly, often murderously, complete...

...She takes no chances, leaves no room for surprises, offers scarcely any fresh insight into one country of the young that by now seems thoroughly overexplored by British writers...

...His mistress, Diana, can be counted on in intimate moments for such carefully enunciated needles as "Why do you always look as if you're trying to escape from something...

...Janice Elliott's novels, wholly opposite in tone and intent from those of Kingsley Amis, have been lavishly praised in England for their strong and vivid depiction of provincial life in the North country...

...Ted will conquer the world in his science lab...

...Knopf, 203 pp., $5.95), is indeed beautifully felt and meticulously written, but its account of a close-knit group of school friends is fundamentally uninteresting...