Customer Reviews

One Fat Englishman

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It's a pity this book, first published in 1963, is out of print. Though not one of Kingsley Amis's better known novels, it is brim full of his usual brio and highly intelligent writing style. The title character in this case is Roger Micheldene, a dyspeptic Englishman in America for two weeks who is at odds with everyone he meets. Roger, who considers himself "qualified in gluttony, sloth and lust but distinguished in anger," feels himself surrounded by idiots and frequently lets them know it. He spends most of the novel trying to get into bed with the wife of a friend, or indeed any woman, and thoroughly disrupting Anglo-American relations in the process. Amis manages to make us like, or at least be interested in, a person whose chief behavior trait is "being awful." Fortunately, he surrounds Roger with a panoply of vivid secondary characters, such as the American literary agent who is crazy about all things British, the obnoxiously smart college student, the persistent priest who sees in Roger a soul in conflict. In his quest for self-gratification, Roger loses as often as he wins, but the contests are extremely entertaining and the author's observations about American and British sensibilities are priceless.

Roger Micheldene is an Englishman, forty-ish, who works for a publishing house and is in the States on a two-week trip, part business and part pleasure. For Roger, pleasure consists of gluttony, brow-beating virtually all males he comes across, and fornicating with just about all females. He is abominable. He also is fat - a bothersome handicap in the sexual chase. As the novel opens, Roger is beside a swimming pool on a warm Indian Summer afternoon; others join him, some to go swimming, including a woman he keenly wants to bed. Perspiring heavily, Roger removes his tan-and-slate tweed jacket. "He would have liked to take off far more than his jacket, but knew he was the wrong shape for this. For instance, his mammary development would have been acceptable only if he could have shed half his weight as well as changing his sex." Hence, many of Roger's coups occur in dimly lit places, with women who are either as soused and/or as randy as he.

Kingsley Amis works this shtick to a fair-thee-well. He has one other comedic theme: the differences in speech, custom, and culture between the Brits and the Yanks. It, too, is over-flogged. There are many witty lines - this is Kingsley Amis, after all - but overall ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN is sour and dyspeptic. It is the sixth, and least by far, of the Kingsley Amis novels I have read. I cannot warmly recommend it, even to Amis enthusiasts.

This silly book is only for Kingsley Amis admirers. It tells of an articulate, obese, philandering English literary agent who when he isn't drunk, belligerent or lost, is strangely attractive to women. The obnoxious fatty is among East Coast academics whose own morals aren't much stronger but who are far more amiable. Colleges are given the names of popular beer labels (Budweiser, Schlitz, etc.) and the students are largely hostile to learning. Fun to read.

While reading Kingsley Amis' novel One Fat Englishman, fragments of a quote quietly resurfaced in my mind, as though someone had whispered it to my ear in a crowded room. Not wishing to misrepresent the author, I went in search of the full ensemble, for I thought sharing it might aid this review. The quote was printed in the Critical Quarterly in 1998 and was from Christopher Hitchens, who queried "by what awful ironic betrayal of our language do we find ourselves accusing bigots and tribalists of the sin of `discrimination'? They are the ones who judge severely by category, and yet can't tell anyone apart. `Discrimination' is only one of the moral and intellectual exercises that they are quite unable to perform." Discrimination (or is that indiscrimination) can be found in spades in this book. The main character, Roger Micheldene, as well as the narrator, serve up racist, anti-Semitic, anti-American and sexist epiphanies throughout the 190 odd pages. When one encounters this sort of behaviour in real life, it is generally delivered in either angry or distrusting tones, as it does with Roger. However, as in real life, what this is actually hiding beneath the facade is insecurity, self-loathing and fear of that which is not understood. Roger is immensely self-conscious about his weight; early in the book he refuses to take his more than his jacket off despite stifling heat because it would expose his true girth, as well as his man-boobs. He's also rubbish in bed. Despite these short-comings, he has no qualms about providing critiques of others on these exact traits. Hypocrisy runs deep here.

Roger is perhaps best described as a grouchy, lecherous, selfish, misogynistic middle-aged British publishing agent who gets through life being extraordinarily unpleasant. Quite apart from the expected response to his demeanour and looks, he unbelievably seems to have the lady-pulling ability of a twenty-year old prince. Bedding women is so expected, that the mere postponement of sexual relations with his main lust interest, Helene, leaves him wanting to "step forward and give Helene a medium-weight slap across the chops", but only resists this on account of the detrimental impact it would have on his future chances with her. Helene is married, but affairs are almost expected for the characters of this book. It is around their affair, while Roger spends some time in America, that most of the pages in One Fat Englishman are filled.

Roger is also tries to decide whether to make an offer to publish a book called Blinkie Heaven (blinkies being blind people - geddit?) by Irvine Macher. Macher sees himself as something of a devilish leprechaun, springing up at various points throughout the story to irritate Micheldene and provide some comic fodder. This is very much how the book felt to me: dark, bitter laughter punctuating irritation. Everything about this story feels overly contrived; the relationships between Roger and women; the relationship with Roger and Macher (and Atkins - another pot-stirrer); the settings and situations that eventuate; the quarrels; the ending; the list goes on. I didn't feel absorbed into this book at any point, which I did in Lucky Jim and That Uncertain Feeling. It makes for suspicious reading. Mercifully, however, he made this story funny, unlike the inhumanly dull I Like it Here, but it's still not enough to save this one.

As a sort of footnote to this review, I find it slightly bitter (as well as slightly disturbed) to note to that One Fat Englishman describes elements of Amis at the time of his writing of it, and presciently, of his later life when the alcohol had robbed the charm from his wit (very much an observation one can make of Roger Micheldene). In the time just before the publishing of the book, his wife at the time, Hilly, wrote in lipstick across his back "1 fat Englishman - I f--- anything" [my deletion]. It's perhaps not entirely surprising that she did this, given he was a serial adulterer, just like Roger Micheldene. Later in life Amis became a terribly anti-Semitic and shared the prejudices that Micheldene has. This knowledge makes the book a more interesting study, but to me, no more impressive as a work of fiction.

I have read several Amis novels recently, and I have noticed that they all seem to be written at a different pace. 'Take a Girl Like You', for instance, is carefully constructed, an artful comic novel. 'I Like it Here', is a very relaxed meditation, full of droll asides, almost Amis talking to himself.

'One Fat Englishman' however is a full on assault. Micheldene is fat, lustful, greedy and has a Rottweiler of a temper. On the other hand, he is searingly bright and hilarious.

This book could not be published today. No publisher would print, I shouldn't think, a novel containing so many comments so overtly sexist and racist.

Another point: I should think you could read this novel as a commentary on Anglo-American relations at any time since 1774.

Unmissable.

KIngsley Amis at his best, and this book surely qualifies, is anti-everything. Most of all he's against a loathsome, pathetic, drunken example of a fat Englishman abroad, patterned most accurately after himself during his Princeton years. How can you fault a man who casts a cold eye on the worst in all of us and doesn't spare himself? Amis is not so much a satirist as he is a realist in the great Russian and French tradition. His people as not caricatures. They are fully dimensional and brutally so, with all the weaknesses, hypocracies, and strength of character that human beings display on varied occasions. Amis was a incorrigible womanizer and knows his subject. He writes about the female as few males have ever been able to do, both lovingly and cruelly as the moment calls for. There have been many books about American academe and those who people and profit from it, none more on the nose than this one. The final showdown between a self-adoring American, a confused Danish beauty, and the fat man is amongst the best moments in modern English literature.