One Fat Englishman

It's a pity this book, first published in 1963, is out of print. Though not one of Kingsley Amis's better known novels, it is brim full of his usual brio and highly intelligent writing style. The title character in this case is Roger Micheldene, a dyspeptic Englishman in America for two weeks who is at odds with everyone he meets. Roger, who considers himself "qualified in gluttony, sloth and lust but distinguished in anger," feels himself surrounded by idiots and frequently lets them know it. He spends most of the novel trying to get into bed with the wife of a friend, or indeed any woman, and thoroughly disrupting Anglo-American relations in the process. Amis manages to make us like, or at least be interested in, a person whose chief behavior trait is "being awful." Fortunately, he surrounds Roger with a panoply of vivid secondary characters, such as the American literary agent who is crazy about all things British, the obnoxiously smart college student, the persistent priest who sees in Roger a soul in conflict. In his quest for self-gratification, Roger loses as often as he wins, but the contests are extremely entertaining and the author's observations about American and British sensibilities are priceless.