Lucky Jim

When someone in the Imaginary Friends Book Club proposed reading Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, I went downstairs to find my copy, and came back up having found only Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad. The paperback I was remembering must have been from my college-professor-parents' house.  So on a subsequent visit to a used book store whose shelves struck me as an oddly exact recreation of my parents', I picked up a copy of Lucky Jim, a spoof of British academic life in the 1950s.

I read the whole thing because it was mildly funny in a low-key, David Lodge kind of way.  But I have to wonder about the point of digging this one up. Didn't we get over the 1950's already?  Wasn't all of Jim's sort of fumbling about with women addressed by the "summer of love"?  And if he didn't want to be a history professor, then surely the lesson of the hippies was that he didn't have to be.  So why reread this book?

It's very British; I was continually irritated by the reiterations of Jim's feeling that "nice things are nicer than nasty things."  Duh!  Only the British eat seed cake when there's gateaux to be had.

Jim, whose last name is Dixon, is very irritating. He rarely does anything nice for anyone; in fact, he specializes in making other peoples' lives more difficult.  That can be funny, but at--what is, for me at least--a very low level, as in this passage:
"when publicly disagreeing with her husband for example, she was the only living being capable of making Dixon sympathize with him. It was rather annoying to hear how kind she'd been; it entailed putting tiresome qualifications on his dislike for her."

When another character finally asks Jim why he wants to teach medieval history in a college, he reveals himself to be the 1950's version of a slacker, one who had some choices but didn't care enough to make them:
"the reason why I'm a medievalist, as you call it, is that the medieval papers were a soft option in the Leicester course, so I specialized in them. Then when I applied for the job here, I naturally made a big point of that, because it looked better to seem interested in something specific. It's why I got the job instead of that clever boy from Oxford who mucked himself up at the interview by chewing the fat about modern theories of interpretation. But I never guessed I'd be landed with all the medieval stuff and nothing but medieval stuff."

Amis' comic genius, if you think he has any, lies in his ability to capture the small details of conversation that can make it so awkward and wearing, like when someone says a word wrong because he's thinking of another word and you start thinking about that instead of what he's said:
"'And I happen to like the arts, you sam.'
The last word, a version of 'see', was Bertrand's own coinage. It arose as follows: the vowel sound became distorted into a short 'a', as if he were going to say 'sat'. This brought his lips some way apart, and the effect of their rapid closure was to end the syllable with a light but audible 'm'. After working this out, Dixon could think of little to say, and contented himself with 'You do', which he tried to make knowing and sceptical."

Every time Jim said something awkward in a conversation, I was torn between laughing at him and identifying with him, which disturbed me because I didn't like him!  And yet I often say things like he does out of nervousness when I'm at an academic gathering:
"'Well, it's an unexpected pleasure to be drinking pints at a do like this.'
'You're in luck, Dixon,' Gore-Urquhart said sharply, handing around cigarettes.
Dixon felt himself blushing slightly, and resolved to say no more for a time. None the less he was pleased that Gore-Urquhart had caught his name."

At one point when they're sitting at a table and Jim Dixon is observing a conversation, his thoughts are petty and mean in almost the exact same way mine would be in a similar situation, which made me grin and cringe at the same time:
"Gore-Urquhart had tilted his large dark head over towards Bertrand; his face, half-averted, eyes on the ground, wore a small intent frown, as if he were hard of hearing and couldn't bear to miss a word. Dixon couldn't bear not missing any more of it--Bertrand was now using the phrase 'contrapuntal tone-values'--and switched to his right, where for some moments he'd been half-conscious of a silence."

The high point of the novel is when Jim finally says to his annoying and manipulative friend Margaret what readers have been longing for him to say for pages and pages:
"Don't be fantastic, Margaret. Come off the stage for a moment, do."
And then she has a page and a half of hysterics, ending with having her face slapped and being given a glass of whiskey, which she takes and "with eerie predictability she choked and coughed, swallowed some, coughed again, swallowed some more." 
If there's any satisfaction in the ending, it's that Margaret is revealed as a fraud and Jim gets free of her.

Overall, though, I'd take rereading Lodge's Nice Work over plowing through this old-fashioned relic, if I felt the need for British academic humor.  The uncomfortable pleasure of reading the quite awkward bits of conversation is the only reason this particular novel should still be read at all.  Have you ever had a conversation at an academic gathering that made you feel you had just said something monumentally stupid?  And did you cringe for days afterwords?

An Increasingly Banal Life

I've been a fan of David Lodge ever since I read Nice Work as a newly minted PhD, a fictional account of a new PhD's job search via adjunct teaching positions. She finds out that a life in academia is nice work if you can get it (a la the song, which plays in my head whenever I see the title on my shelf). So when I saw his newest, Deaf Sentence, I was particularly interested. My father suffers from increasing deafness, and I have always had some trouble with auditory discrimination (picking out a conversation from background noise).

And the first half of the book was delightful. The narrator, Desmond, is, of course, intelligent and acutely self-aware, and he articulates in detail the daily struggles involved with a diminished capacity to hear. One of my favorite parts, that actually made me laugh out loud, was this, from a party conversation:

"The pastime of the dance went to pot," Sylvia Cooper seemed to say, "so we spent most of the time in our shit, the cows' in-laws finding they stuttered."
"What?" I said.
"I said, the last time we went to France it was so hot we spent most of the time in our gite, cowering behind the shutters."
"Oh, hot, was it?" I said. "That must have been the summer of 2003."
"Yes, we seared our arses on bits of plate, but soiled my cubism, I'm afraid."
"I'm sorry?"
"We were near Carcasonne. A pretty place, but spoiled by tourism, I'm afraid."
"Ah, yes, it's the same everywhere these days," I said sagely.
"But I do mend sherry. Crap and sargasso pained there, you know. there's a lovely little mum of modern tart."
"Sherry?" I said hesitantly.
"Ceret, it's a little town in the foothills of the Pyranees," said Mrs. Cooper with a certain impatience. "Braque and Picasso painted there. I recommend it."
"Oh yes, I've been there," I said hastily. "It has a rather nice art gallery."
"The mum of modern tart."
"Quite so," I said. I looked at my glass. "I seem to need a refill. Can I get you one?"

Soon after that passage, however, the plot declines into the travails of Desmond's even-more-deaf and aging father and Desmond's own sexual longings, which turned me off the book completely. There are few things I hate worse in a book than having to be in the head of an old man thinking about sex. I hated it in Updike's Rabbit Run when I was 16. I recently hated it in Gerald Duff's story Charm City, from Fire Ants and Other Stories. And I really, really hated it in Deaf Sentence.

So despite the abundant charms of the first half, which include musings on why blindness is tragic while deafness is merely comic, and despite the fact that I plowed on through the book to the end, because I rarely give up on a book in the middle (if I do, various endings play in my head for weeks afterwards, so if I don't like a book, it's better to just read the ending the author wrote and get it all over with), I didn't end up liking Deaf Sentence. The puns of the first half eventually give way to Desmond's banal life in the second, and if I want banal life in November, I can just put the book down, now can't I?