My bookclub read this Kingsley Amis book after hearing it referred to as a modern classic and very funny. The consensus opinion in the bookclub meeting was, eh, not so much. Only two people had finished it, though. I was not one of them. I did finish it that night, and liked it better after finishing it. And I noticed that although none of us found it that funny, we did laught a lot talking about it.

The book is the story of Jim Dixon, who has his first college teaching job in one of the less prestigious British universities. He doesn't like the job, or most of the people. He is in something, not quite a relationship. wth Margaret, who recently swallowed too many pills over despair over another man. He meets another woman, Christine, who is dating the son of his chairman. It is a recipe for disaster, but it all turns out right in the end. ( )

Any book that can make you laugh aloud and want to get back to it even after some dull pages must be worth 4 stars. I wouldn't go to 5 because the characterization of some key people - the loathsome Bertrand most significantly - is too punch-bag, and when Jim is about to throw up his hopes of Christine out of some dutiful fidelity to the ghastly Margaret, whom he has seen through so thoroughly, Amis seems to be sticking his oar in a bit clumsily on behalf of the plot. But the important thing is that it's a really enjoyable book, and that rare thing - a funny book. Most minor characters are superbly drawn. Masses of anger and misery under the comedy. ( )

One of my favorite books of all time. Being a graduate student in history myself, I can relate to Jim Dixon on a number of levels. Especially the feeling that the worth of my work too can "...be expressed in one short hyphenated indecency (15)." There are many passages of this book that are laugh out-loud funny, especially the parts where Jim visits his adviser, Prof. Welch, for a weekend of madrigal singing.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys reading about the foibles of academia and the pretentiousness of some of those who inhabit it. ( )

So British, so funny - especially if you ever went to graduate school, or as one of my friends said, if you have ever been drunk. ( )

Hmmm, quite a difficult one to review, this one. It's a bumbling, amusing sort of story about a bumbling, amusing sort of fellow - the very 'old-style-British' lecturer Jim Dixon. Basic plot: Jim is trying to up his standing at the university and impress his eccentric superior, Professor Welch, despite being hopelessly inept and pretty much detesting even his own work. Neurotic Margaret is claiming too much of his attention, which is unfortunate as his attention has been captured very much by the rather prim young girlfriend of Welch's odious son Bertrand. Mishaps and misunderstandings ensue as the web of academics and wives and sons and lovers becomes ever more tangled, with Jim trying to keep up at every turn.

It's not as funny as I thought it would be - perhaps some of it went over my head given its age - though there were a fair few 'slight smile' moments and even one or two 'choking on my coffee' lines. It struck me more than once that some of the humour and the mannerisms of the characters might be more smoothly captured on screen than they were on the page. That said, Jim comes across as likeable, confused, rather innocent and childlike at times, and seems to reflect a kind of caricature of every moment that we as men and women in society feel put upon, disappointed, cheered, or just plain bewildered. A nice little novel with a touch of Wodehouse about it - not sure whether it's a keeper or not yet but I'm glad I finally got to reading it! ( )

I defy anyone to read this book without laughing out loud like a fool. ( )

Hapless Jim Dixon is among the greatest characters of comic fiction, and this novel is the benchmark against which all academic satire is measured. It is a book that I never tire of reading. ( )

Lucky Jim is an acerbic, witty, biting satire of British red brick college life in the nineteen-fifties. The war is over & all the survivors are back to figure out what to do next. Our hero is teaching history (sort of) in a British college that is decidedly not Oxbridge & trying to stay employed.

This comic novel is filled with wonderful & odd characters who are of their type, but somehow aren't stereotypes - the absent-minded professor, the vain artist, the jealous co-worker - we ...more Lucky Jim is an acerbic, witty, biting satire of British red brick college life in the nineteen-fifties. The war is over & all the survivors are back to figure out what to do next. Our hero is teaching history (sort of) in a British college that is decidedly not Oxbridge & trying to stay employed.

This comic novel is filled with wonderful & odd characters who are of their type, but somehow aren't stereotypes - the absent-minded professor, the vain artist, the jealous co-worker - we all know these people, but Amis' twist on them is hilarious & original.

I think perhaps best of all is the way that Amis is able to laugh at the foibles of all of his characters, including the aforesaid Lucky Jim. There is an everyman quality to Jim Dixon that draws the reader in - you like him even when he's behaving like an ass.

My favorite bit was the weekend arty house party & all of the occurrences around that including the best ever description of being drunk & then of being hungover.

Despite its relatively sedate age big chunks of this are laugh out loud funny & much of it still resonates today. This was another great read. ( )

Part of book project. Not really very funny. The kind of book where you just wonder what stupid thing the hero is going to do next.

My desert island book. A classic and timeless satire on the absurd posturing of academia. Contains perhaps the greatest desciption of what it's like to wake up with a hangover!

Jim is barely hanging on to his job at a small English university, and if he can't suck up sufficiently to the head of his department, he has no chance at all of of staying employed. It doesn't help that he gets drunk, speaks his mind, and antagonizes all of the wrong people. One of the funniest books I have ever read! ( )

Certainly it is chockfull of sociological information, and there are some LOLs. But your Angry Young Men have always been a bit MIA in terms of my (extreme) appreciation of the mid-20th century English novel, and so Lucky Jim privided me with an opportunity to think about why. Thing is, we should be hopping the fuck on board, right? That title, the subject matter, the promise of sexy times and fighty times and hilarious embarrassments that you'll laugh about when you're old and events don't happen in your life anymore. I'm 28 - there's still some sap in me. I still remember gettin' all Sick Boy in high school, thrusting thrusting thrusting, and oh, that whole phase of life, right through to "Martin should sit on my lap" and demurring and realizing I was getting a bit wiser and then, in the bathroom, "You're definitely getting a Friendster testimonial for this." Ha ha.

And we've all been there, even if only for a few glorious moments at 21 - young blades. And we want Jim Dixon just to be a slightly more repressed, better dressed version. But that's putting stresses and strains on the psycholiterary consciousness Amis is coming out of in postwar Britain that it just can't handle.

Or, in simpler language: We want to identify with Dixon, so why can't we? Because - let's face it - he's kind of a cunt. Not a cad - a role which has aged better even as the term has fallen into disuse - but a (useless, doss) cunt. We thrill a bit when he and Christine kiss, or when he punches Bertrand the hell out, but it's mixed with squishy embarrassment - is he going to bottle it? We (I) get my workin'-class comb up, but then you're always afraid he's going to start tugging his forelock - and while his rage of faces is comical and all, there's something so depressingly bourgeois in it - is it a specific character in British TV comedy with the rage faces? Mr. Bean or some shit? See Al Bundy, anyway.

So he's well flawed as a blank slate reader-champion. But identifying with your protagonists is fascistic anyway. Can we lose the self-glorification project and just read and enjoy? To a point. But the flip side of this is that it's a mid-20th century British novel, and so everybody is - let's just say it - shudderingly unpleasant. The moment at the end where Jim is like "Oh, the old prof isn't so bad after all" and then still harshes on him and his family with Christine when they're making their big exit stays with you because it's so vindictive - like, really, all any of them did is cross Dixon's overdeveloped sense of annoyance. And all he did is fuck up and fall down a bit, and there he is all pariah, and oh everybody is just so sweaty-palmed and arrogant, at your feet or at your throat. And the women, oh, the women. Christine is presented in what seems intended to be an appealing way, but she's so limp and '50s and, you know, the kind of female character that seems intended to retroactively justify men treating women (even smart ones) as sort of half-retarded by nature.

I used to feel it poignant, a bit, that Amis was so gutted by his son being a better writer. Now I think of him cramming his kids' pockets with condoms and menacing them through the doors of the whorehouse and just being a blustering bully of the sort that was so common in our grandparents' generation, and probably is tied up in interesting ways with having been through, and won, the war. This book could have been a less touchy, bristly experience if Amis had had the psychological touch of a Greene, and it comes over in scattered moments - your Carol Goldsmith, your Gore-Urquhart, even Jim, who isn't as objectionable all things considered as I may have made him out to be. But the humanity sits uneasily with the cheap laffs - and you sit uneasily waiting for Amis to either be real with you or go whole-hog slapstick.

Or both, man. Irvine Welsh did it. Compare the "bedclothes" scene in Trainspotting with the one in this book. Which is funnier? Which is more awful? Which makes you remember the character in question in a more complex, nuanced way? It's not really Amis's fault that he didn't have scatological humour available - it's the fault of his nasty, repressed, desperately self-satisfied era. But that marks the book too. Give me that story about the boys who tear that dude's house down. ( )

Funniest book I've ever read. ( )

Time is kind to some books, to others there is nothing more cruel. At the time that it was written, 1954, it probably said a lot about the English class system in a frightfully witty way: by the early 1970's, when I first read it, it was an amusing bit of fluff, now, to anyone not around at the time, it is sadly something of an irrelevance.
The strange thing is, that it is not the upper middle class twits that seem to have died out. The dinosaurs have remained it is homo sapiens, in the form of the aspiring working class which have retreated from the arena.
Dixon remains a complex character; at first, annoying but ultimately the hero and through a rather contrived set of circumstances, ends up with the girl, the job and the moral high ground. I think, today, that there is no point in putting any slant upon the book: just enjoy a diverting - if somewhat inconsequential read. (Good for the beach!) ( )

TRANSLATE from English, American to English, Great Britain: ACADEMIA SMOKES MY COCK, BB.

Lucky Jim is very good and very funny, but not as funny as it thinks it is. As a novel, with grand climaxes, soaring eloquence, and thrilling twists, Lucky Jim is a bit lame. Flaccid, slow-moving, and dogged with painfully transparent wish fulfillment (why WOULDN’T a hot 18 year old want to bang me? ALL 18 year olds love College Lecturer jock!) as well as a rapid last chapter powered solely by a series of fortuitous deus ex machina (WRAP IT UP BOX TO THA MAX), it can make for an impatient read.But as an anthropological look at all the suffocating pretention of Bougie Behavior? Lucky Jim is spot on and deadly funny. Come for the cruel mockery! Stay for the cruel mockery! Is it a one note book? Yes! Does this matter when you’re an insecure, mediocre student getting crushed under the wheels of academia? NO. ( )

I first read the thing back in the summer 1975 (I can be sure of the date because it was part of my University set reading – I was going ‘up’ to Leicester to study for a B.Sc. and some ‘wit’ had included this on the list of ‘books to study before coming’ as it was supposed to have sketches of people still teaching at the university in it – if it did, I never met them).

I didn’t find it very funny then, and I find it even less so now.

It is in the genre of ‘campus novels’ – a particularly tacky genre – and is claimed to have been ‘seminal’ – for which I shall never forgive it.

For those who don’t know, campus novels are about College and University campuses; are written by people whose whole lives have been blighted by the college experience and consequently feel it incumbent upon themselves to inflict a similar blight on the rest of their and future generations; they usually attempt to be ‘hilarious’ – and fail.

Campus Novels are loved by academics (a sort of S & M experience, I would suggest) and book critics (who tend to be failed academics - and consequently promote them as some sort of revenge taking experience). They pop up far too often on suggested reading lists and the like.

‘Lucky Jim’ supposedly changed the whole post-war generation … with little evidence to support this, I am firmly ‘in denial’.

Jim Dixon is the sort of lout who, because he had nothing better to do and is too lazy to do anything anyway, enters the University lecturing profession dishonestly – claiming interest and expertise where he has none. The book follows this thug’s adventures through a ‘red-brick’ university where he causes drunken destruction and chaos wherever he goes. He exhibits the sort of socialist rhetoric you’d expect and lands a job at the end with a millionaire.

What is clear to me (although not so clear to many at the time of publication, or since) is that Mr Amis does not like Jim – he is an ‘oink’ of the wrong class and only becomes respectable at the end as he moves into the pale blue conservative world. His luck is in escaping the not-really-university ‘red-brick’ institution, whose academic standards and personnel are only a joke.

The so called humour is in fact barely disguised contempt for the genuine changes brought on by a World War that shattered the privilege of education and class (although not so effectively). Educating this sort of person is obviously a dumbing-down in the eyes of Mr Amis.

The excellent introduction to the Penguin Edition, by David Lodge, also points out the attack being made on Graham Greene – especially on ‘The Heart of the Matter’.

There are obvious connections and references – from suicide to doing ‘the right thing’.

All I can say is I re-read, ‘The Heart of the Matter’ recently and was impressed: I re-read this slight book and found it severely wanting.

Fortunately Mr Amis went on to write better things – unfortunately, his politics went even further in the wrong direction. ( )

I'm so glad I picked this book up. It is delightfully funny in a rather understated way. The characters become real enough to care about during the course of the story. The more improbable the situations, the more believable they are. This is a book you'll want to read again ( )

Loved the humor. If you're American and youarent paying attention while you are reading this book, its likely that you'll miss a good portion of whats going on. A lot of names to keep up with at the beginning, but you catch on towards the middle of the book. ( )

Brilliantly funny, and I quite identified with Dixon's social awkwardness and mishaps. Also contains my favourite description of a hangover:

"He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider- crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not so much as looking at things did: he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross- country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad." ( )

Classic Humour Academics

Lucky Jim is perhaps the best comic novel I've ever read, and yet it also manages to have both a heart and a point.

Amis tells the story of Jim Nixon, a junior lecturer at a provincial English college. In his eight months as lecturer, Jim has failed to make a good impression on his boss, Professor Welch; his personal life is equally in shambles after his presumptive girlfriend Margaret attempts suicide. Jim is compelled to attend an arty weekend at the Welches’, where he meets Bertrand Welch, Professor Welch’s arrogant son, and his girlfriend Catherine. Jim desires both Catherine and a new life in London, but feels beset by bad luck which prevents him from obtaining these desires.

As the novel’s title implies, luck plays an enormous role in Jim’s life: both the bad that befalls him, and the good that eventually comes to him, appear (at least to Jim) to be a matter of luck. When Jim is facing a spot of “bad luck,” his reaction to it can seem less than noble; certainly, Jim experiences his share of plain bad luck, but some things—such as when he burns his boss’ guest sheets in a drunken stupor—do seem to be within his realm of control. Jim’s saving grace is that his reaction to good luck is much the same; he does not falsely pretend that anything good that comes to him does so because he’s exceptionally bright or worthy, or because he’s entitled to it. In contrast to Bertrand’s overwhelming sense of entitlement, Jim’s attitude is quite refreshing.

Though Jim is an imperfect character, he is redeemed by the fact that he does not pretend to be otherwise. Unlike many of the characters who surround him—the Welches, Margaret, Johns—Jim is startlingly free of pretension and hypocrisy. The Welches, and most obviously Bertrand, are all social-climbers; they are middle class (and the provincial at that), yet through ostentatious displays of art appreciation and disparaging views of the lower class, they attempt to distinguish themselves as cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and elite. Interestingly, the only character who actually is upper class, Mr. Gore-Urquhart, displays the same lack of pretension and hypocrisy as Jim does.

Jim is not a hero, but nor is an anti-hero; he is a member of the middling sort who happens to have a good conscience and spirit. In reading up about the background of novel, I found that Somerset Maugham disparaged the book for celebrating the “white-collar proletariat,” someone who was actually “scum.” The book was subsequently awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize. I think this amusing anecdote nicely sums up the spirit of ,i>Lucky Jim. ( )

I had high expectations for this book that were not entirely met. There are in this book several gems that need to be extracted from what too me feels like a plodding narrative. Among the gems: i) you will find here some of the best descriptions of facial expressions ever committed to page; ii) if you like John Cleese's monologue on what it means to be English from "A fish called Wanda" you will find here its proper literary background. ( )

This was Amis' first novel, published in 1954, and I consider it to be the granddaddy of the genre. Lucky Jim isn't so lucky -- he's on the verge of losing his junior teaching position at a second rate college in rural England, and in order to save his job, he's going to have to lick up to his odious boss, Neddy Welch, a pompous ass who insists that Jim deliver a prestigious lecture based on Neddy's pet manuscript-- a hackneyed discourse on "Merrie England." One humiliation is piled upon another as Jim is forced to join in parlor sing-ins of esoteric madrigals, stroke Neddy's ego, and ingratiate himself to Neddy's son Bertrand, a pretentious (and awful) novelist who just happens to be dating the woman of Jim's dreams. Irreverent, angry, and anti-Etonian, Jim is delightful as he deflates the rarified heights of one of England's not-so-ivory towers. ( )