Volume 54, Number 9 · May 31, 2007
'Bad Behavior' & Kingsley Amis
By David Lodge
The Life of Kingsley Amis
by Zachary Leader
Pantheon, 996 pp., $39.95
This book runs to nearly a thousand pages, including 116 pages of notes (many of them substantial). Does its subject deserve this enormous biographical effort and corresponding demand on the reader's time? Whether you immediately answer 'Yes' or need to be convinced will depend very much on your age and nationality. For English readers and writers born in the 1930s (like myself) or a little before or after, Kingsley Amis was a key figure in postwar British culture, whose importance and influence cannot be measured simply by the intrinsic merit of his books. In America he has always had a small band of fans, mostly Anglophile academics, and his first novel, Lucky Jim, is regularly assigned in courses on modern British fiction, but the reading public never really embraced him with any warmth. Lucky Jim, a critically acclaimed best seller in the UK, sold only two thousand copies in the US in its first two years. According to Zachary Leader, it was not until Edmund Wilson reviewed Amis's second novel, That Uncertain Feeling, in The New Yorker in 1956, comparing him to Evelyn Waugh, that he began to be taken seriously in America, and even so, Leader observes, 'Amis never sold well there.' Leader says nothing about translations and foreign sales of his work, but my impression is that Amis's fiction, like warm English beer, is a taste that Continental Europe never acquired.
Review, 4430 words
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