Lucky Jim
By: by Kingsley Amis ; introduction by Keith Gessen
Series: New York Review Books classics
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9781590175750
Description: First published in 1954, this book is a hilarious satire of British university life. It is a young man's book, in fact a book of two young men. They are not exactly angry young men, but they are extremely irritable. College friends with similar backgrounds, they graduated from both Oxford University and World War II to find themselves in an England in terminal decline. It has lost overseas possessions that had once been its pride, and the people in charge are snobs and incompetents. Worst of all, no one seems to appreciate the young men's genius: neither the women they meet not the publishers to whom they send their works. "Lucky Jim" Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of the new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons as long as Jim can keep in with eccentric Professor Welch, survive a madrigal-singing weekend, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England' and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's awful son, Bertrand. Here the reader is lead through a gallery of English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Jim must contend in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.