Lucky Jim: So Wrong but So Well Done

I want to sing the praises of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim because there are many things to praise in this novel.  Before I can find the right key to sing in, however, I need to quiet the criticisms that are simultaneously harping in my brain.  The two most distracting elements for me were the lead character’s ugliness of character and the sexual politics of the novel.

Dixon, the protagonist of Amis’s tale, is a first year lecturer of history in an unnamed university.  Dixon is beleaguered by the absent-minded chair of the history department whom Dixon needs to impress if he wishes to keep his job.  Why Dixon wants to keep his job is a mystery, and why we would root for him to succeed in keeping his job is no less of one.  He hates teaching, he hates academic research, he hates academic writing, he hates the one student who seems interested in his class, and he can’t stand anyone who takes the university setting seriously.  Now, I have been an academic, and I can relate to the things that Amis wanted to poke fun at, but Dixon is so full of vitriol and misery that I found no pleasure in his frustrations.  As readers, we are clearly aligned with Dixon, cheering for and siding with him as he stumbles through his daily struggles.  Most of the time, I found him to be just petty and annoying in his hatefulness.

My edition has a forward by David Lodge, who explains the cultural moment of Lucky Jim and the post-war class issues of London and its environs that made me understand Dixon differently, but without that explanation, I would never find a way to make Dixon especially palatable.  Now I can have an intellectual appreciation for what Amis is doing, but I can’t wash the bad taste out of my mouth where Dixon is concerned. 

At the heart of the novel is a love triangle between Dixon and the two women he courts.  Margaret is a fellow instructor whom Dixon is entangled with even though he doesn’t like her all that much.  She looks alright, though she looks a little to “mannish” for his comfort.  One night, drunk, he makes an advance on Margaret, and she lets him at first.  Part way in, she appears to change her mind and kicks him out.  Later, he thinks on the encounter: 

 But he wouldn’t have tried, would he? or not so hard, anyway, if she hadn’t seemed so keen.  And why had she decided to seem so keen, after so many weeks of seeming so not keen?  Most likely because of some new novelist she’d been reading.  But of course she out to be keen anyway.  It’s what she really wants, he thought, scowling with the emphasis with which he put this to himself.  She doesn’t know it, but it’s what she really wants, what her nature really demands.  And, God, it was his due, wasn’t it?  After all he’d put up with.  

  Yeah.  That’s what it really says.  Still later in the novel, when he breaks it off with her, Margaret goes into full blown hysterics, causing Dixon’s neighbor to slap “Margaret several times on the face, very hard” and then shake her “vigorously.”  This cure is just what she needed, and when she comes too, Margaret apologizes.  The neighbor refers to her as “girlie,” and she responds to him by sincerely saying, “Thank you so much, Mr. Atkinson; you’ve been wonderful.  I just can’t thank you enough.”  Ha!  That killed me! 

I actually liked Margaret, but I was clearly in the wrong.  Before Dixon can get together with the proper girl, he has to have good grounds for ditching Margaret.  Just walking away, an act that Margaret seems to condone, is for some reason unacceptable to Amis.  Apparently that is another cultural moment that does not translate to a 21^st century American reader.  So how does Amis create the necessary schism?  We learn in the penultimate chapter that Margaret is dangerous and damn near insane!  She’s a liar and a manipulator and a harmer of innocent menfolk.  No one could blame Dixon for walking away from that!  Ugh.

Meanwhile, the greatest thing that Dixon can say about Christine, his bona fide love interest, is that she is really pretty.  The sexual politics of the novel suck.

After all that, it is going to seem strange that I still say that this is an excellent novel.  I can’t help but admire Amis’s deft handling of the plot, which while relatively simple is also extraordinarily tight.  The scenes begin and end excellently and progress naturally.  The writing is sharp and witty. The comedy (when I am not wincing at the characters’ characters) is solid.  Take this description of waking up hung over: 

Dixon was alive again.  Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but the summary, forcible ejection.  He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.  The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.  A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse.  His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.  During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police.  He felt bad.

The novel employs a very tongue-in-cheek tone that is fun to play in when the nasty attitudes don’t get in the way.  In the end, it’s a romantic comedy that could have starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, and when I think of Dixon being portrayed by Grant, I could see myself enjoying the story a lot.  It’s well worth the read, even if you get hung up on the politics like I did.  If your political views are less intrusive than mine when you read, then I would think that you would find the novel a very rewarding read.