The thing about you and your wife making love was that it made things all right, not often forever but always for a long time and always for longer than the actual love-making. In that it was unique; adultery could make life more interesting but it couldn’t make things all right in a month of Sundays. And as for booze you must be joking – as well expect a fairly humane beating-up to do the job. (p.180)
Jake Richardson is 59, a grumpy Oxford don who lives in London outside the short Oxford terms, with his ‘fat’ wife Brenda. It is a narrow, comfy, settled-down kind of life, trips to the supermarket, to the off-licence, dinner in front of the TV, never any entertaining, rarely going out to parties, never to the cinema or theatre. However, the novel opens with Jake seeing his GP because something’s wrong: he has of late lost all interest in sex, he knows not why, it has just evaporated – disconcerting for a man who’s had several marriages and countless affairs, a man hitherto obsessed with girls and sex. What’s his problem?
Answering that question sparks the quest which underpins this relatively long novel (280 pages) and whose main purpose, on the face of it, is to take us into the world of 1970s sexology for primarily comic purposes. Jake is passed from his GP to a sex psychologist (Dr Rosenberg) who prescribes various ‘wacky’ activities, like non-sexual stroking and companioning sessions (‘non-genital sensate focusing’) with his wife, to a hilarious scene where he is fitted up with a device to his penis in front of a number of medical students and shown various pornographic photos and texts to measure his (negligible) arousal, through to an encounter group (run by long-haired ‘Ed’) where he and Brenda are meant to share their problems with a selection of complete, and predictably off-the-wall, strangers.
Plot
A lot of the plot is taken up with Jake grumpily going about his usual tasks and responsibilities, punctuated by the escalating sex therapy ie trips to the psychologist, the humiliating trip to the lecture theatre, the first encounter group and so on. But three sub-plots emerge which flavour the narrative:
One Eve is the college secretary. He had a fling with her a decade ago (as did many men) but she’s been happily married for ages and is now very respectable. A casual, everyday hello leads to her spotting Jake is not, in fact, OK and this leads Jake to half-heartedly invite her out to dinner, where she makes her position as a married woman plain, he says of course we’re just old friends chatting and then, at the start of the next chapter, there is a long, comically inevitable and bitterly funny description of his shattering hangover and his slow realisation that he’s in an unknown bed, his head on an unknown pillow and he stretches his hand out to encounter – an unknown buttock. Yes, he got so drunk he ended up pleading to sleep with Eve but, once the deed was done, in true male chauvinist pig style, turned over and started snoring. The next morning Eve lets him have both barrels of her contempt and he crawls away feeling like a worm (although, in a not very funny follow-up chapter, we see him retelling the whole story to a gay don, maliciously exaggerating Eve’s awfulness and, more germane to the novel’s theme, wondering what’s gone wrong with his radar, with his normal sense of decorum, with his life?).
Two One of the more florid members of the encounter group, Kelly, follows him and Brenda home after the first session, invites herself in, and recounts a cock-and-bull story about trying to incriminate Ed, the encounter group facilitator – though when pressed on details she backs down and Brenda eventually persuades her to leave. Clearly deranged. Weeks later she turns up uninvited in Jake’s rooms in Oxford and makes a pass at him, which he vigorously rejects, whereupon she hurls an impressive array of modern abuse at him before collapsing in tears etc. Deranged and dangerous.
Later still it is through her that Jake learns that the encounter groups, which Brenda has continued going to, are building up to an encounter weekend. Mildly disquieted that Brenda hadn’t told him about it, Jake finds himself asking the shrink to be re-included in the group and invited to the weekend.
Barely have they arrived at the hotel-cum-conference centre than Kelly corners Jame again, making him promise to come up to her room soon after midnight. Jake wisely tells all this to Brenda who wisely advises him not to go – and so he doesn’t. Which is regrettable because in the early hours Kelly is discovered having taken an overdose and scribbled a suicide note; presumably she intended Jake to find her soon after she’d swallowed the pills and so his decision not to go put her life in real jeopardy.
a) This suicide bid ie real psychological pain, has a damping effect on the comic tone (as it does in Malcolm Bradbury’s classic of just a few years earlier, The History Man). Even before this development, Jake (and Amis) had found themselves noting the depth of Kelly’s misery with unsettling acuity. When Kelly bursts into tears after he’s rejected her,
Jake had come across lachrymose females before too, but never one who gave such a sense of intolerable pressure within, as if what was being wept over was growing faster than it could be wept away. (p.216)
Real misery is often uncomfortably close in Amis, despite the comic ranting, the bleakness of the human condition emerging into the light of day in novels like Girl, 20 and Ending Up. Being forced to see view world from this perspective forces the fully adult reader of this novel to see Jake as the spoilt, overgrown schoolboy he actually is; it is the triumph of Amis’s style and its vigorous, insulting humour to conceal this obvious conclusion for such long stretches of the novel.
b) Kelly’s suicide attempt prompts the climax of the main thread of the novel, because Jake is genuinely outraged at the matter-of-fact way his psychologist and the group facilitator blandly discuss the Kelly situation as just one more piece of interesting case study, even as she’s being rushed off to hospital in an ambulance. So he has a king-size go at both of them, a set-piece speech criticising their supposed ‘method’, the main thrust of which is his attack on the basic premise of therapy, that dragging everything out into the light of day will make it better when, he asserts, more often than not it does the opposite. He cancels all his sex therapy and storms out.
[In its way this big anti-therapy speech struck me as being as incoherent and unimpressive as the other set-piece scene, Jake’s ‘playing devil’s advocate’ speech in front of the college Governing Body. That scene is complicated because Jake starts out arguing (against his own beliefs) in favour of admitting women, but then finds himself being goaded by a few donnish questioners into eventually dropping his allotted role and delivering a fiery diatribe against women and against admitting them to male colleges. Jake’s rant boils down to saying, ‘Do you really want loads of nattering gossiping chattering women everywhere who will destroy the cosy, all-male cameraderie we all enjoy’? Hardly earth-shattering arguments and not a very persuasive performance and not particularly funny. For a woman reader, inoculated against its immature boyish humour, probably very offensive. The same happens here in the anti-therapy speech. Is this the best Amis can do, is this the strongest case he can make against the 1970s fashion for therapy? Jake is meant to be a clever academic, and Amis was a very clever man, but his attempts at consecutive argument are generally dire. He is always better, much more persuasive, powerful and funny, at his true métier, comic abuse.]
Three There is a very effective dramatic moment early in the novel when, after his and Brenda’s first joint meeting with Dr Rosenberg, Jakes continues about his day doing odds and ends and then goes to bed and various stuff goes through his mind and then, only as he is dropping off to sleep, has he got nothing left to keep him from facing the Big Revelation of the day: that after he had had his say to the therapist about not fancying women any more, Brenda had flabbergasted him by delivering a coherent and deeply-felt, fifteen-minute-long monologue about how he didn’t care for her any more, never showed any affection or interest in her doings, how any shared interests they had had evaporated, how their marriage had become an empty shell. The way this thought, and the anxiety it causes him, is held back and revealed only late in bed as something Jake has been repressing from himself all day, is very effective. But in terms of plot or theme it introduces the idea that it’s not just Jake who’s unhappy.
Therefore, when Jake drops out of the weekly encounter sessions after just one visit but his wife continues going, I thought, hello: suspicious. Other things happen (the fling with Eve, the don’s meeting and suchlike) but when, a lot later, Kelly tells Jake about the long weekend encounter meeting at a retreat in Gloucestershire and Jake realises Brenda hadn’t told him, aha, my suspicions revived. And although Brenda acquiesces in Jake’s decision to go along (once he’s learned about it) and although, once they’re there together, she sticks by him pretty firmly after Kelly’s suicide bid and even after the earlier stuff about Kelly trying to seduce him in Oxford (which Jake hadn’t told her about) comes out — well, even so, I wasn’t at all surprised when, once they are back in London, recovering after this traumatic weekend, Brenda simply announces she’s leaving him.
That she’s doing so to move in with the gimpy husband (Geoffrey) of her unbearable best friend (Alcestis) is a surprise and a kick in the teeth for Jake, but his emotional response is very underplayed: he is mostly concerned about who will do the housework and prepare the meals. Maybe he is the unfeeling, self-centred, male chauvinist pig everyone says he is. Oh well. So be it.
What was before him left him cold, and he didn’t mind. (p.33)
The novel ends with Brenda moved out, the awful friend coming round to offer to do their shopping together but – fortunately – nothing more, no hint of a pass or them shacking up, and Jake settling in quite well to living on his own and eating heated up dinners in front of the telly.
Attitude
So much for the plot which boils down to clever elaborations or examples of two related themes – male impotence and the battle of the sexes. Or the awfulness of middle-aged men…
But the engine of the book, the reason for reading it and the main source of enjoyment, is less the ostensible ‘plot’ but Jake’s Amis-like disdain, contempt and exasperation at almost every aspect of modern life and every other living soul, a rage expressed at numerous levels of the text, from long set-piece scenes designed to highlight the rubbishness of today’s youth or whatever, to conversations discussing the multitudinous forms of modern crapness or themselves demonstrating the inability of anyone to understand anyone else, down to casually satirical or dismissive turns of phrase – this attitude saturates the book on every page and is often very, very funny.
The fundamental comic trope is the howling disjunction between Jake’s well-educated mind, manner, clothes and pukka tone of voice — and the roaring, raging, spitting fury at the shabbiness of the modern world and the vast stupidity of everyone else which seethes inside his skull, constantly expressed in fantasies of Neanderthal violence:
To distract himself from restraining himself from kicking Geoffrey in the balls Jake said, ‘What’s whatsisname like, Ed, the fellow who runs these do’s?’ (p.158)
It was all that training with Miss Calvert and some of his other pupils, all that not going for them with the sitting-room poker at each new display of serene apathy, which restrained him now, he would have alleged, from jumping feet first at Ed’s face. (p.166)
It is exaggerated for comic effect but it makes it even funnier to think that Amis the author means it too, that such appalling curmudgeonliness and omni-directional enfuriated exasperation once walked the earth (as a glance at either his Letters or biography swiftly confirm).
Oxford
There is, of course, another big side or aspect to the novel: Oxford. Jake is an Oxford don and this entails scenes set in Oxford: a total of one (I think) actual tutorial, a lot of tasty lunches and dinners, high-falutin conversations with other dons etc. But the Oxford sections are, on the whole, weak and boring. Unless you are going to make them grotesques from the start (as Tom Sharpe does, in Porterhouse Blue his satire on Cambridge), then you have to spend a bit of time, and take reasonably seriously, dons and their subjects and the bitching and back-biting over sherry in their rooms or over rack of lamb at high table, and so on and so on. And this has all been done before, a thousand times: Jake’s irritation at college life feels clichéd (after all his debut novel, Lucky Jim, is one of the original taking-the-mickey-out-of-higher-education novels). It lacks the wild energy of, say, the opening scenes of Evelyn Waugh’s classic Decline and Fall and certainly lacks the originality and bite of his virulently expressed dislike of other aspects of modern life. The energy level drops in these scenes.
They are given coherence of a sort by making them address one of the ‘issues of the day’, the aggressive campaigning by young women to be admitted to all the (then) male-only colleges. This results in a string of would-be hilarious scenes based on this theme: for example, on his arrival back at Oxford for the new term, Jake has to run a gauntlet of bra-less feminists blockading the entrance to his (fictional) college, Comyns, who rub their breasts against him and tweak his pecker through his trousers. And, as mentioned, he then gets lumbered with representing the womens-admissionist point of view in the debate the dons stage. And the one tutorial we witness is him trying not to slap a slack, lazy, dim woman student of his. Interspersed are scenes of him discussing these incidents or others like them in rooms or over dinner with the other dons, which are a festival of sexist comments about women this or women that, the casual misogyny and sexism of male academics talking safely among themselves. Which we know were pretty similar to Amis’s own attitudes, the ones he exaggerated more and more coarsely as he grew older.
But, no matter how offensive, most of the Oxford scenes felt slack and half-hearted. For example, his college has a porter, Ernie, who talks with a funny west country accent and always manages to block the narrow gateway into the college whenever he’s in a hurry to get in or out. The accent is quite funny, funny voices having been an Amis speciality right from the start of his writing career, but the idea itself somehow doesn’t get traction.
Not only are the silly traditions of Oxford colleges remote from most people’s experiences, but the entire women’s-lib-era issue of whether to admit women to the male colleges is a fight which is of purely historic interest now, which seems immeasurably distant, like the suffragettes. This also dims its relevance for a contemporary reader.
Anger and energy
What the Oxford sections for the most part lack is the comic edge provided by the real anger Amis generates about his other targets: like young people, juke boxes in pubs, ‘convenience’ food, jet airplanes, the modern design of anything, modern architecture, modern trains, buses, bus conductors, shop assistants, children, trendy psychologists and so on. And on.
All the dishes were firmly in the English tradition: packet soup with added flour, roast chicken so overcooked that each chunk immediately absorbed every drop of saliva in your mouth, though the waterlogged Brussels sprouts helped out a bit there, soggy tinned gooseberry flan and coffee tasting of old coffee pots. (p.246)
In the pub, Jake pulls over a stool,
finding that its top was covered with the same stuff as the bench. Apart from being so covered it was too convex to suit a normal bum like his, pleasing as that convexity might well have been to the trend-blurred eye of whatever youthful fart had designed it. (p.91)
Not to say that some of the Oxford moments aren’t very funny. Before the Governing Body of his college gets round to debating the admission of women, they deal with other relatively insignificant issues, including the purchase of a new set of chairs for the library, an example being brought in and all the dons liking it, until they are told the cost – £125 per chair!
… and all over the room there were wincing noises, rather like but in sum louder than those made by Brenda on getting into a cold bed. For a chair! they all kept saying – for a chair? Not quite all. Of course it seems a lot, said Jake to himself, but haven’t you noticed that everything seems a lot these days, you fucking old fools? (p.205)
(The swearing, the intemperate use of language, is intrinsic to the comic effect, and it is noticeable that Amis uses the f word a lot in this book.) You almost wonder whether Amis had compiled a list of targets and was working his way through it with the aim of insulting just about every category of person and object in existence. Grumpy old man doesn’t begin to capture it.
Funny how everything horrible or foolish was worse if it was also American. Modern architecture – modern American architecture. Woman who never stops talking – American ditto. Zany comedian. Convert to Buddhism… (p.154)
Conclusion
Outrageously (ie rudely, abusively) funny for the first 100 pages, the novel loses energy in the Oxford scenes which appear in the middle, and then the group therapy weekend – which I was hoping would provide a farcical apogee – is instead a depressing anti-climax, Kelly’s suicide attempt too close to the bone and Jake’s ‘sod psychotherapy’ speech not as coruscating or persuasive as it should have been. Plus the fairly intense misogynistic sentiments expressed throughout the text might well put off a lot of women readers or reasonably-minded readers of any gender.
That said, it still contains hundreds of burningly funny, violently contemptuous, frustrated, angrily witty and humorous scenes, asides, turns of phrase or moments of dialogue which are hugely enjoyable. And the best joke is saved for the very last line of the novel, which wonderfully sums up Jake’s situation, his attitude, his plight, and his bloody-mindedness. You’ll have to read it to find out why.
The title
The apparently throwaway title, Jake’s Thing, has at least four meanings that I can think of:
- the overt subject, his medical issue, his impotence
- a slang expression for his penis
- in the argot of 1970s therapy lingo, his thing, man, his (generally very negative) attitude
- and his ‘issues’ with women i.e. his deep-seated misogyny
Related links
Reviews of Kingsley Amis’s books
1954 Lucky Jim – Jim Dixon is a fraudulent history lecturer at a non-entity college, beset on all sides by problematic relations with ghastly people – with his pompous boss, Professor Welch and his unbearable family, with his clingy neurotic girlfriend, with the shower of contemptuous colleagues he shares a cheap rooming house with. Very funny in a sometimes rather desperate way.
1955 That Uncertain Feeling – Bored, frustrated librarian John Lewis in South Wales finds himself being seduced by the worldly wife of a local industrialist. Some hilarious scenes rather damped down by the wrenching portrayal of his genuinely hurt wife. An intense scene of dissipation and sex on a nearby beach, climax with the mistress’s mad driving home which leads to a sobering crash. Lewis eventually rejects the whole monied, corrupt scene and moves with his wife to a small mining town where he feels more in touch with his Welsh roots.
1958 I Like It Here – Welshman Garnet Bowen, happily scraping a living as a ‘writer’ in London, married to Barbara with three young children, is persuaded by his publisher to go ‘abroad’, to make some money from writing articles and also to check on a long-silent famous author who has resurfaced with a new novel – resulting in an amiable travelogue with comic characters and not much plot.
1960 Take a Girl Like You – the adventures of Jenny Bunn, twenty-year-old northern lass come down south to be an infant school teacher, who is pursued by every man she meets not to mention the lesbian lodger, and falls into a fraught relationship with public school teacher Patrick Standish, who is unforgivably harsh with her and sleeps with a number of other women, before they both rather reluctantly agree they have to get married.
1962 My Enemy’s Enemy – seven varied and persuasive short stories, including three set in an Army unit which anticipate The Anti-Death League and a seventh which is a short, powerful science fiction tale.
1963 One Fat Englishman – Obese, alcoholic, lecherous English publisher Roger Micheldene drinks, eats, insults and fornicates his way around New England, hideously embarrassing himself, his country, and the reader.
1965 The Egyptologists (with Robert Conquest) – an intermittently hilarious novel about a ‘society’ of Egyptologists with elaborate rules designed to prevent anyone outside the select few attending its scholarly meetings – but which, alas, turns out to be the front for a group of women-hating adulterers.
1966 The Anti-Death League – A long, convoluted and strikingly unfunny story about an Army Unit somewhere in the countryside which is preparing for an undefined and rather science fiction-y offensive, Operation Apollo, which will apparently have dire consequences for its officers. In particular the male lead, dashing James Churchill, who has a genuinely touching love affair with beautiful and damaged Catharine Casement.
1968 Colonel Sun: a James Bond Adventure (under the pseudonym Robert Markham)
1968 I Want It Now – The adventures of Ronnie Appleyard, an ambitious and predatory TV presenter, who starts off cynically targeting depressed young Mona, daughter of Lord and Lady Baldock, solely for her money and contacts, but finds himself actually falling in love with her and defying both the dragonish Lady B and the forces of the Law, in America and London.
1969 The Green Man – a short, strange and disturbing modern-day ghost story, told by the alcoholic, hypochondriac and lecherous Maurice Allington.
1971 Girl, 20 – Music critic Douglas Yandell gets dragged into the affair which elderly composer Sir Roy Vandervane is having with a 17-year-old girl and the damage it’s doing his family and grown-up daughter, the whole sorry mess somehow symbolising the collapse of values in late-1960s England.
1973 The Riverside Villas Murder – Detective novel set in the suburban Home Counties where the loss of handsome 14-year-old schoolboy Peter Furneaux’s virginity is combined with a gruesome murder, both – it turns out – performed by the same good-looking neighbour.
1974 Ending Up – A short powerful novel showing five old people, relatively poor and thrown together by circumstances into sharing a run-down country cottage, getting on each others’ nerves, appalling younger relatives when they visit, plotting and scheming against each other, until the bleakly farcical ending in which they all die.
1975 The Crime of the Century – detective serial written for the Sunday Times then published as an entertaining novella, Amis’s style is stripped to the bone in this yarn of a serial killer of women who succeeds in sowing multiple red herrings and false leads, before his melodramatic and implausible attempt on the Prime Minister’s life.
1976 The Alteration – a brilliantly imagined alternative reality in which the Reformation never happened and England is a central part of the ongoing Catholic Hegemony over all Europe, known simply as ‘Christendom’, in a novel which explores all aspects of this strange reality through the story of a ten-year-old choirboy who is selected for the great honour of being castrated, and how he tries to escape his fate.
1978 Jake’s Thing – Oxford don Jake Richardson has become impotent and his quest to restore his lost libido is a ‘hilarious’ journey through the 1970s sex therapy industry although, as always with Amis, the vitriolic abuse and sharp-eyed satire is interspersed with more thoughtful and even sensitive reflections on middle-age, love and marriage.
1980 Russian Hide-and-Seek – Soft science fiction set in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians and in which a hopeless attempt to overthrow the authorities is easily crushed.
1984 Stanley and the Women – First person narrative told by muddling middle-aged advertising salesman Stanley Duke, whose son Steve suffers a severe mental breakdown, thus (somehow) leaving poor old Stan at the mercy of his wife, ex-wife, ex-mistress and the insufferable female psychiatrist who treats the boy. Long, windy, self-pitying, misogynistic.
1986 The Old Devils – A 400-page magnum opus describing the lives, tangled relationships, the endless bitching and phenomenally unhealthy drinking of a dozen or so elderly, grumpy Welsh men and women, the trigger of the meandering ‘plot’ being the arrival back in their South Wales community of professional Welshman and tireless philanderer, Alun Weaver. Long and gruelling until its surprisingly moving and uplifting conclusion.
1988 Difficulties with Girls – A sequel to Take A Girl Like You, revisiting lecherous Patrick Standish (35) and his northern wife (Jenny Bunn) as they settle into a new flat on London’s South Bank, encounter the eccentric neighbours and struggle with Patrick’s sex addiction.
1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill – An amiable look at a cast of characters which rotate around retired librarian Harry Caldecote who lives in London with his sister, worries about his dim brother Freddie, and the rather helpless lesbian Bunty who he’s found accommodation for, dodges his scheming son Piers and his alcoholic niece-by-marriage, posh Fiona. His most enjoyable novel for years.
1991 We Are All Guilty – A short polemical novella for teenagers in which Amis dramatises his feelings that society has become rotten with do-gooding social workers, psychiatrists and trendy vicars, via the story of Clive Rayner, a teenage tearaway who breaks into a warehouse for kicks but causes an accident in which the night watchman is crippled. Instead of being harshly punished, Clive finds himself being exonerated and forgiven by everyone, which leaves him boiling with rage and frustration.
1992 The Russian Girl – Middle-aged Russian literature expert, Dr Richard Vaisey, has an affair with a talentless young Russian woman poet who is visiting London, which results in his wealthy wife kicking him out of their house, destroying all his books and notes, cutting off his allowance and generally decimating his life. Brutally funny.
1994 You Can’t Do Both – The boyhood and young manhood of Robin Davies who, like Amis, is at secondary school during the 1930s, at Oxford during the war, obsessed with girls girls girls throughout, and completely fails to live up to his responsibilities as a supposed adult, continuing to have affairs behind his loyal wife’s back until his final, humiliating come-uppance.
1995 The Biographer’s Moustache – Literary hack, Gordon Scott-Thompson, is commissioned to write a ‘critical biography’ of super-annuated novelist and social climber Jimmie Fane, leading to a sequence of comic escapades, which include being seduced by his pukka wife and a prolonged visit to the surreally grand home of the Duke of Dunwich, before Gordon’s plans, inevitably, collapse around him. Very enjoyable.
Books & Boots 