Volume 34, Number 5 · March 26, 1987
Closing Time
By David Lodge
The Old Devils
by Kingsley Amis
Summit Books, 294 pp., $16.95
Kingsley Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), did more than inaugurate a British version of the campus novel already established by Mary McCarthy and other American writers. It made its author, willy-nilly, the standard-bearer for a whole new school of British novelists, who refused the mythopoeic streams of consciousness of the great modernists, and the somewhat specialized social and spiritual preoccupations of their successors, like Greene and Waugh, in favor of an observant and irreverent rendering of the texture of ordinary life, especially provincial life, in Britain, as the nation sluggishly tried to free itself from the constraints of the prewar class system.
Review, 2526 words
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