A virgin's progress amid orgy and seduction. When attractive little Jenny Bunn comes south to teach, she falls in with Patrick Standish, a schoolmaster, and all the rakes and rogues of a provincial "Hell Fire Club".
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amis hits his stride with a funny but dark novel,
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This review is from: Take a Girl Like You (Mass Market Paperback)
Kingsley Amis opened his career with the novel that remained his most famous work to the end of his life: Lucky Jim. His next two novels were generally regarded as disappointments, at least relative to Lucky Jim. It is with his fourth novel, Take a Girl Like You, that Amis again hit his stride. This is as with almost all of Amis's works a comic novel, but much darker than Lucky Jim, with a cad for a leading man and a rather sad (morally) ending.The protagonist is Jenny Bunn, a 20 year old girl from the North of England who has come to a middle class town near London to be a schoolteacher. Jenny is an extremely beautiful woman, a bit naive, and brought up with fairly conventional notions of sexual morality. Which have been a bit of a burden to her since about the age of 14, when she noticed that all of a sudden she was constantly the object of not always welcome male attention. Soon enough at her somewhat depressing boarding house she meets a very charming and handsome man named Patrick Standish. Patrick is breaking up with her fellow boarder, a somewhat ramshackle Frenchwoman named Anna Le Page. Patrick immediately notices Jenny, the way all men seem to, and not long after he has asked her on a date. Which is quite a lot of fun, until Patrick closes the evening by rather insistently trying to seduce her. Patrick is a schoolteacher himself, at a private school for boys, and apparently rather good at his job. He has the same problems with his bosses that every Amis leading man seems to have: his headmaster is pleasant enough but ineffectual, and another teacher is a very nasty piece of work. But we slowly gather that Patrick is far from blameless: most egregiously, he is not trying very hard to resist the head's 16 year old daughter's pathetic attempts to sleep with him. He also cruelly torments the clumsier and stupider people around him. The novel portrays Patrick's courtship of Jenny, over roughly a year's period. This includes attempts to persuade her that her moral views are outdated, a long period of trying to be "not a bastard", failed attempts to resist having sex with other women he encounters while away from Jenny (the dates are a good thing, see, to prove to himself he really loves Jenny ... but he still has sex with the women) ... and finally an ultimatum to Jenny to sleep with him or end the relationship. Which leads to a crucial act and a dispiriting but believable conclusion. As it happens, this is the only novel to which Amis wrote a sequel: Difficulties With Girls, a couple of decades later, in which Jenny and Patrick are married, but Patrick is still philandering. That book ends a bit happier, with Jenny gaining the ultimate upper hand in their relationship. I think this is an excellent novel. The various characters are thoroughly believable to me, and a varied and odd lot. Amis's comic eye for dialogue, and internal dialogue, is sharp as ever. The novel is funny when it needs to be, and honest and sad when it needs to be.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Leaves a bad taste.,
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This review is from: Take a Girl Like You (Mass Market Paperback)
Love Lucky Jim and would also highly recommend The Old Devils and Ending up; however the main character of this novel, and the sequel, Difficulties With Girls, is such a despicable, amoral opportunist and sexual predator that I would not recommend those novels to anyone.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read it and Weep,
This review is from: Take a Girl Like You (Mass Market Paperback)
I read a few Amis novels about thirty years ago and always rated him, finding his slightly vicious wit a good tonic.I picked up this after going through some books, being in a novel-reading mood, somewhat unaccustomed as I am. I was just astounded at Amis's skill, the minutiae of observation which fill almost every single paragraph. Yes his humour has an edge, but what comes through is a lusty reverence for life in all its bizarreness. I found myself thinking this novel is more like real life than any novel I can remember reading, but no doubt that says something about my own, almost public school background. This is very funny but also at least to me a profound examination of relations between the sexes and full of the most devastating character sketches.
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