Customer Reviews

The Life of Kingsley Amis

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3 star:		(1)
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I love Amis' work and expect that he'll be read as long as literature has legs, but this bio requires a lot of stamina. It's all there: drinking, carousing, family life, contrarian politics, the wicked sense of humor. Leader did an enormous amount of research and doesn't pull punches about some serious character flaws. One thing that bugged me throughout was the implicit assumption that the books and poetry were autobiographical - besides being factually wrong, this drags things out unnecessarily.

If I was going to pick out a novel of Amis for the uninitiated, I'd have to make it 3 of them to show his versatility: "Lucky Jim", "The Alteration", and "Ending Up". But you wouldn't go wrong with "Take A Girl Like You", "Girl, 20", "The Anti-Death League", his collected short stories or any of his criticism.

This a hefty read -- there are relatively few biographies of literary figures that are as long. But, the length is worth it. Leader writes gracefully and interestingly about a man who often is hard to like but difficult not to admire. Most of us know Amis either as the author of "Lucky Jim" (book and movie) or as the father of the Booker Prize winner Martin Amis. Kingsley's career, however, is more important than those two claims to fame. He was one of the initiators of the Angry Young Men who had a major impact on English writing from the 1950s on. And, he brought back to English, and American poetry, an emphasis on accessibility to the average reader, although his effort is not always visible today. Further, he was the model of the hard-drinking, womanizing author that populates so much of popular fiction and film. In that story, we find a lot of what makes his life so sad as well as so interesting. And, this is an interesting book that takes you inside the creative process of writing and the destructive process of hard living.

To begin with I didn't like this book, in fact I put it away three times. This because of its style, I thought it humourless and pedantic.

In fact however Leader's style is down to a combination of academic virtuosity and prodigious research. Reading this, you get the feeling there is no-one who ever met Amis he hasn't talked to and made notes on. Consequently, during his account of any event in his life, you get references to different articles, conversations, references and asides that any number of acquaintances have come up with. Until you get used to it this makes the book very hard to read.

This is not the kind of biography where the author tells a story. Nor is it one where the author feels obliged to burden us with his opinions. But he does want to make sure we have understood the opinions of everyone who was involved at any time.

At no point is Leader analytical. When it comes to the difficulties or tragedies in Amis's life, we are spared sermons or even anything but his casual opinions. We are just told the story in unremitting - if appropriate - detail.

In the end I got enormous enjoyment, captivated by Amis's life. I got used to the style and it all flowed along. It was also easy to skip the odd page when the events discussed were not of interest without losing the rhythm.

I had read about eight of Amis's novels recently and wanted to know more about him and about his other works. This book works well for that as each book is discussed for itself and also situated in Amis's life.

The discussion of Amis's family life is rewarding and moving. You get the goods without being given the benefit of any moralising.

I don't read a lot of literary biographies, but I would have thought this a model.

I found it a struggle to stick with this biography, though I am a big fan of Kingsley Amis and was eager to learn more about his life. I wasn't impressed with author's writing style, found it a bit labored and muddy, and the way he keeps looking for confirmation of Amis's persona in his fictional characters got extremely tiresome and distracting. I think the biggest prblem for me here is that the narrative just isn't smooth enough or captivating enough. I got the feeling that Leader was afraid to say anything truly critical.

Zachary Leader's book intrigued me even though I'm not much of a fan of the novelist Kingsley Amis, but I had followed something of the fallout that attended the previous biographer Eric Jacobs when he got "fired" by the Amis family and given the sack and prevented pretty much from editing Amis' letters (often quite witty) and writing this biography.

I would think it would take a certain kind of person to step in on top of such a disaster and actually take the reins and do the book. What I didn't expect is that it would be so thorough. That's putting it charitably, the book is far too long. Then again if one was really convinced that Amis was a great writer and that the second half of the 20th century should have been named the "Amis Era," then you too would probably right something as long as this. The "Amis Era" formulation is not Leader's own, by the way, but a funeral notice he quotes with approval.

Anyhow it's all individual taste isn't it. In my eyes, each chapter just proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Amis and Larkin might have been the two biggest pigs ever to pick up a pen. But Leader, while admitting some of their faults, just thinks they're the cat's meow because, I suppose, for him they were England's leading novelist and poet respectively. I don't think so, and he was never able to persuade me otherwise. The detailed notes of the plots of each of Amis' three dozen novels were an embarrassment in fact... Maybe there weren't three dozen, it just felt that way. His womanizing and drinking are amusing, it's his bigotry and contempt for the world that nauseates. AND the over-ratedness. How did he get so lucky? Leader makes a case that Amis appeared at the right time, and just in the right manner; the social and political conditions were crying out for a man with all of Amis' qualifications, and something about the very slightness of LUCKY JIM appealed to a taste grown tired of modernism, tired of asking questions, to a generation that wanted to have a laugh and to feel that they were cool doing so.

I've been reading the book for well over a year, as some men read Proust I read Zachary Leader's life of Amis and now, as I come to leaf through the book again trying to sum up my general impressions, I find that my memory must be fuzzy. There are whole chapters with mysterious titles that yield nothing back to me, even though I spent a month reading each. What was (chapter 9) "Swansea"? Leader's predilection for dating everything according to what mansion Kingsley and Hilly (or then Kingsley and Jane) were living in at the time never clicked for me Chapter 17: "Patrick and Dai." Refresh my memory, Zachary Leader! Were they, perhaps, Amis' dogs? Make them wag their tails, make them bark at me! Don't leave me like this.... I can date my entrance into this book (I had the ARC), it was February 2007. That means... click click click... it's been more than a year, more like a year and a half. I could have walked to Swansea at this rate, been there to chuck Patrick and Dai under their long floppy ears.