Volume 7, Number 5 · October 6, 1966
Anything Goes
By Bernard Bergonzi
The Anti-Death League
by Kingsley Amis
Harcourt, Brace, 307 pp., $5.95
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
by Richard Fariña
Random House, 329 pp., $5.95
The Time of the Hero
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Grove, 409 pp., $5.95
Each book that Kingsley Amis publishes makes the popular conception of him as a predominantly comic novelist seem less realistic. It is, after all, more than twelve years since the fairly uncomplicated fun and high spirits of Lucky Jim and since that time Mr. Amis has been getting steadily gloomier, though without losing the power to be devastatingly funny when he wants to be. The dark side of his imagination has long been apparent in his poems, though these are not widely read; few readers of his last two novels, Take a Girl Like You and One Fat Englishman, can have missed their intermittent brooding on death, physical disability, the inescapability and unsatisfactoriness of lust, and the general arbitrariness of fate. If they were still broadly comic, their comedy was frequently undermined by these grimmer preoccupations. In The Anti-Death League Mr. Amis plunges bravely into the depths that he has for some time been uneasily contemplating from the brink.
Review, 1560 words
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