Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim tags: annoyance, writing 1357 likes Like Dixon was alive again. As Christopher Hitchens has written, “If you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis 28,676 ratings, 3.75 average rating, 2,137 reviews Open Preview Lucky Jim Quotes Showing 1-25 of 25 If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing. The major setting of this novel is the provincial university where Dixon is working and also desperately trying to maintain his position. His first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), established his reputation as a writer. More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy postwar manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom, whatever form they may take, and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh. Frame of Mind followed in 1953 and Poems: Fantasy Portraits in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954.
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