Difficulties With Girls [Audio Cassette]

Kingsley Amis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 5, 1990

Over 25 years ago, Kingsley Amis wrote TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU, a comedy about a lusty young couple, Patrick and Jenny, each engaged with equal ardor in gaining an opposite goal -- he with getting her into bed, she with staying out of it. They both win.

In DIFFICULTIES WITH GIRLS, Jenny and Patrick are back with us. They're older, though not much wiser -- Jenny, devoted but aggrieved; Patrick, boozing and unfaithful. Each lives in a fantasyland projecting life through lenses not calibrated in this world.

"To have said so much about the human condition with such wit and humor is an extraordinary achievement ...even for Kingsley Amis." (The Sunday Telegraph, London)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Patrick Standish, "hardly going bald at all" at 37, reads girlie magazines and is having an affair with the woman next door. His over-accommodating wife Jenny, 28 and still childless seven years after her miscarriage, cozies up to gamy ex-Washington journalist Oswald Hart in an effort to bring her cad of a husband to his senses. The Standishes' sexual and emotional warfare forms the hub of Amis's wobbly satirical lunge through late 1960s London. Besides Patrick, other men having "difficulties with girls" include Timothy Valentine, who left his wife to try homosexuality; Simon Giles, pompous manager at the publishing firm where Patrick works; and Stevie and Eric, a gay couple prone to flamboyant arguments. With Swiftian glee, Amis deflates a menagerie of poets, publishers, academics and other snobs, phonies and egomaniacs. Yet on the whole, his satire is a flaccid, tedious affair that could have been set in the '80s as easily as in the '60s.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Everybody in Amis's new novel has difficulties with girls, even Jenny Standish, nee Bunn, whose husband Patrick can't leave them alone. Jenny and Patrick appeared in Amis's Take a Girl Like You ( LJ 1/1/61). Since then Patrick has moved on from teaching to editing, so Amis manages a number of running jokes about publishers. His main subject, however, remains the guerrilla war between the sexes. The year is 1967, a time ostensibly of liberation for heterosexuals and (especially in Britain) homosexuals alike--but only ostensibly. Amis is his country's funniest writer, yet some scenes here are so impenetrably British that only Anglophiles may get the joke. Buy accordingly.
- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Books on Tape, Inc. (September 5, 1990)
• ISBN-10: 0736618201
• ISBN-13: 978-0736618205
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Up on Housing Project Hill, January 14, 2011

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conjunction - See all my reviews

This review is from: Difficulties with Girls (Hardcover)

I don't think this is quite up to its prequel, 'Take a Girl Like You', as it lacks the sheer zest of the earlier piece, but what it lacks in joy it almost makes up for in the determination of the dogged pursuit of the labyrinthine twists of the marriage-serpent's tail. The sheer energy of the author as well as his main protagonist are remarkable. It made me at least chuckle out loud all the way through.

This book also contains a healthy dose of prejudices. Five a day and all that. Bob Dylan said negativity won't pull you through. No but a few good splashes will get you round the block a few times.