Lucky Jim

Literary fiction · Comedy · Farce · Satire

First published: 1953
Print length: 251 pagesPenguin, 1992

Description

Jim Dixon teaches medieval history at a provincial English university despite having little enthusiasm for his subject or the academic world around him. With his probationary appointment nearing its end, he must flatter his department head and complete a scholarly article if he hopes to keep his job. His private life is equally constricting: fellow lecturer Margaret Peel’s recent suicide attempt has left him trapped in an unhappy relationship defined by guilt and uncertainty. At a faculty gathering, his attraction to Christine Callaghan introduces another source of risk and confusion. As professional evasions and social mishaps accumulate, an approaching public lecture threatens to expose everything Dixon resents. The novel turns his predicament into a sharp comedy of institutional pretension, emotional manipulation, and reluctant rebellion.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Descriptive · Direct · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Humorous · Irreverent · Satirical · Tense

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Relationships

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

AmbitionClassFreedomGuiltLoveWork

About Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher whose long career combined social comedy with a sustained interest in genre fiction. He wrote more than twenty novels as well as poetry, memoir, stories, scripts and criticism. Lucky Jim (1953), one of the earliest British campus novels, made academic pretension and professional insecurity the basis of direct, farcical comedy and helped set a pattern for later campus fiction. Amis kept returning to vanity, compromised relationships and the pressures of institutions, but he did so in markedly different forms. The Green Man joins a flawed innkeeper’s appetites to a supernatural threat, while The Alteration places a threatened child chorister under an authoritarian church in an alternate England. In The Old Devils (1986), he brought that social attention to aging friends whose drinking, marriages and arguments about Wales expose old grievances.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Penguin
Language: English
ISBN: 9780140186307

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