Jake's Thing

The book arrived promptly in the condition in which it was advertized. The story itself stays in line with most of Amis' other novels so I wouldn't reccommend it for younger audiences or those who don't like to talk about sexual issues.

Yet another book for re-reading. I found that it had actually gained in thirty years. The language is still fresh and fun and when you visualize what you visualize you laugh. Not many books will do that for you. Jake is not an easy character to like. Easy to understand, but is he really worth the trouble of trying to empathize? Yet, the author does something different. The reader does not identify, does nor empathize, but secretly admits that there is something about himself in Jake's thoughts and feelings. No, the reader is not a mysoginist, nor does he have problems with understanding women (or men, or anyone, come to think of it.) In fact there is nothing of Jake in the reader, it is the otherway around. The reader finds himself in Jake without much sympathy or empathy but with the thrill of discovery he does not want to get out. No, not yet. Men and women and their relationships have not changed much for thousands of years. Read Aeschilus, the Odyssey, Adam Bede, Marlowe, Flaubert and why not Jake's Thing. Is it Kingsley Amis himself we are watching or Jake, the character who does not even understand what a character in a novel should be like? What difference does it make? It was not easy, but I liked Jake, and I liked Kingsley Amis for writing about the "Thing", and I liked the writing.

Anyone who has had to seek out an elusive medical diagnosis should laugh aloud. The novel is scabrous and cringe-inducing---and uproariously funny. It should be required reading in all medical schools.

The title is of course nice, in the sense of precise, referring to the way a counsellor might euphemistically refer to Jake's "problem", his impotence, also to Jake's penis, and also perhaps to Jake's attitude. This was the first of the trilogy of Amis Pere's trilogy of deeply angry, anti-humanist and misogynist novels (the others being _Stanley and the Women_ and _Russian Hide and Seek_), and perhaps the funniest. The objects of Amis' satire (trendy doctors and counsellors, the "helping professions" in general) surely deserve the contempt Amis heaps on them, though the satire sometimes spills over into what seems like genuinely felt and personal rage, not quite mediated or controlled by the authorial "voice". But the various appalling and undignified therapies to which Jake is subjected in the attempt to restore his libido are evoked with comic splendour and I suspect bulls-eye accuracy. Jake's mind, body and intelligence are in every sense insulted. Along with _Girl, 20_, with its evocation of 1960s "swinging London" this is the most obviously dated of Amis' novels, though perhaps that doesn't matter much from this distance. What was once trendy (or rather anti-trendy in relation to specific forms of trendiness, which is essentially the same thing) becomes dated, and finally comfortably historical. Though possibly one of the least of Kingsley Amis' novels, and one that shows the man himself at a low ebb (a certain humanism returns with _The Old Devils_ and the last novels, and Amis is much the better for that), this is still a comic masterpiece. No writer has ever done dialogue, and especially dialogue-as-strategy, talk as point-scoring and jockeying-for-position, as well as Amis. Below-par Amis still offers a much better read than most novelists at their peak. Cheers!Laon