Kingsley Amis: A Biography

Kingsley A Biography

A man who considered boredom the worst offense in fiction and nearly the worst offense in life, British novelist Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) is wrought larger than life in Eric Jacobs's engaging biography. Through his student years at Oxford (where "drinking, smoking, and behaving badly" formed the basis for many a friendship), his marriages and simultaneous affairs, his less-than- stellar teaching career, and his highly routinized years as writer and pub dweller, Amis was a merciless raconteur both in print and in person. He shunned all manner of things phony, fashionable, and, of course, boring, and honed his intellect into the acerbic observations that run through all his novels, from Lucky Jim to You Can't Do Both.

Jacobs plays to the Amis anti-academic mentality. The biography contains no scholarly apparatus and is happily footnote-free. The many colorful anecdotes are drawn from scotch-laced afternoon conversations with Amis in his later years and from peppery correspondence between Amis and such lifelong friends as poet Philip Larkin (whom Amis befriended because they were "savagely uninterested in the same things"). Jacobs is diligent about forming connections between the characters in Amis's fiction and the real-life sorrows and anxieties of their author: losing his virginity when an Oxford undergraduate to a girl who primed him with a sex manual is closely replayed in the novel You Can't Do Both. The overall effect is a clear view into a man of outrageous wit and genius and into the large legacy of novels, poetry, and essays he bequeathed. --Joan Urban