I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I think Amis’ Lucky Jim is about as perfect a comic novel as there can be. Using that touchstone, I found Girl, 20 and Jake’s Thing fun reads but inferior. One Fat Englishman gets the same rating, entertaining—albeit disturbingly—but not of the caliber of the cynosure that is Lucky Jim.While the writing is brisk and amusing, if not sometimes straining for a comic understatement, the novel’s principal, Roger Micheldene, a publisher briefly visiting the states for business and pleasure, is just short of being a thorough asshole. His idea of pleasure is satisfying his gluttony, gustatory and amatory. Even more necessary, however, is his need to vent his spleen when things do not go as he wants them to; he feels he can verbally bully someone, whether or not that person is responsible for his predicament.While there are several barbs aimed at Americans (all the colleges mentioned have names of beers [Budweiser, Ballantine, Rheingold...], no one knows Greek, religion is practiced with optimism [and not dread and/or awe], flowers are not grown/tended, there is rampant consumerism, there is too much wildlife [deer and turtles],etc.), all of these seem scattershot and don’t form a coherent argument. The serial sexual conquests Micheldene undertakes (and he’s separated from but near divorce with his second wife, who is still in England) are all rather random too, except for his enthusiastic pursuit of Helene, wife to visiting professor of philology at Budweiser College. But, having lost her, he is at novel’s end content to consider the boatful of women who accompany him on the five-day cruise to England. That prospect is immediately dimmed when Micheldene is greeted by an acquaintance with whom he’s already had three encounters earlier in the novel, an American who is self-flagellating Anglophile. The humor here is that Micheldene’s prospect of pleasure is again going to be thwarted, as it was all through the course of the novel, and that he will most likely continue being an obnoxious ranting pedant.There is some prospect of satire in Micheldene considering buying rights to a first novel by a student from Budweiser, Irving Macher, whom Micheldene comes to perceive is his personal scourge. This young man’s novel, Blinkie Heaven, is the story of a blind man who’s been duped and laughed at unknowingly (as are all blinkies, apparently) by the sighted, which he discovers when he suddenly regains his vision inside a strip club. Micheldene’s not sure what to make of this précis, and he only considers riposting with Macher that it’s perhaps not as humorous as he might believe. But Macher acts the gadfly and impetus to Micheldene’s several travails (stolen lecture notes and at least two thwarted rendezvous with Helene), so it would seem he serves some higher purpose. But there is little to support that, as both men are selfish, pretentious, and pushy, their only differences religion, body type, and age.The novel, finally, impressed me as Amis’ cri de coeur, a painful self-portrayal in which he rants at God for setting hurdles in his path, yet grants Micheldene/Amis access to all sorts of banal venal delights and makes his chief source of delight his own dyspepsic userine perspective. While there is plenty of incident and some very lively writing in places, and occasional innocent humor, there’s far too much of Micheldene’s inexplicable nasty behavior. Micheldene himself knows he is a beast, but he is without the will or means to change, and for this he twice assails a young Catholic priest whom he’s lampooned on first meeting to offer him some sort of absolution. Micheldene’s discomposure with self and God presents an interesting dialectic, but it never fully explains or excuses the brutishness of his behavior.
Not sure if I can write another bloody Kingsley Amis review, especially since while writing this one (I'm a bit behind) I'm already reading another.It doesn't take long to know where you are in a K. Amis book. Witty and honest talk abounds, nothing is sacred (except some things avoided I'm sure), misanthropy is the general tone, and there are some pretty successful uses narrative set pieces and framework. I can see how many people would not find them that funny, and they really aren't, but One Fat Englishman often did bring a smile to my face. I'm a bit bored of the male hero who's only real motivation is to fuck the best looking girl he can. And don't really understand why the best looking women (and the others) end up doing it. That said I don't mind a bit of misanthropy now and again, who can walk around in a giant city all day and not sometimes get?, and the satire can be really observant. My favorite one in this one is the typically American semi-woods backyard of the suburbs. Americas I think (at least most places on the eastern seaboard) are so used to the dark, woody, yards with deer and chipmunks and birds poison-ivy and ticks that they don't understand why this would be strange to others. Amis is very good at pointing this kind of stuff out. He's very good at having perceptive, and eloquent, characters too. And the readers know everything they think. No one would call K Amis the most subtle writer in the world. And though the psychology of his characters is there, its all laid out very clearly, not how most people think our subconscious is usually found. There's (at least) one scene of blatant and seemingly unashamed racism in the book (with the Chinese shop girl who surprises the fat englishman by speaking good English), and the misanthropy it too much, but he can write a sentence, can construct a neat plot (this book is only 160 odd pages), and makes you smile too.
What do You think about One Fat Englishman (1989)?
Hilarious and fascinating: a youngish, and still-reputedly-socialist Kingsley Amis predicts his future as an obese bigoted alcoholic womanizer with astonishing accuracy. Kingsley rarely wastes his words, and his ability to put across comic situations is peerless (well, except for his son Martin). Here we get a darker, nastier version of his usual sexual shenanigans, with some attempted mockery of America thrown in for good measure (the novel is set in a fictional southern college called... Budweiser University). These rubber arrows almost never hit their mark, but when you enter into the booze-soaked priapic maze of the title character's brain, you will not stop laughing.
—Mark Desrosiers
Kingsley Amis is the kind of writer who can give misogyny a bad name.Roger Micheldene, the One Fat Englishman of the title, is gluttonous, alcoholic and adulterous, but mostly just hateful and insufferably British. I winced a lot.What I did like though was how One Fat Englishman got its title. See, when he wrote this, Kingsley Amis was, or would become, all those things that Roger Micheldene was: gluttonous, alcoholic, adulterous, hateful and insufferably British. He famously cheated on his first wife, Hilary Anne Bardwell (Martin's Mum). Hilary, or Hilly, as she was known, found out about the affair shortly before a vacation with Kingsley to Italy and Yugoslavia, where Kingsley passed out drunk on a beach. Hilly took the opportunity to make an editorial comment, in lipstick, on Kingsley's back:At least Kingsley Amis could laugh at himself, in the way that self-loathers usually do.
—Tony
I love Kingsley Amis’s work; Lucky Jim is one of my favorite comic novels (not that I’m alone in that). And at times One Fat Englishman reads like a sequel to that earlier novel…one in which Lucky Jim has grown up gross and embittered and roiling with hate. So ultimately it’s a bit of a downer; the scabrous way Roger Micheldene talks about everyone he encounters would be very funny in smaller doses, but here it’s virtually unrelieved.Roger is a literary publisher visiting an American university, and is in hot pursuit of a colleague’s wife—but not exclusively so; he manages to score with a few other women along the way, none of whom he seems to feel anything for but disdain (at best) or contempt (at worst). In addition to women, he also excoriates children, teenagers, gays, and pretty much every ethnicity you can name off the top of your head. America itself appalls him; and yet he’s no happier to come across any of his own countrymen. Basically he’s a drunk and a braggart and a brute and a prick.However, if you’re going to have a hero as objectionable as this one, you might as well go all in, and portray him with as much comic brio as possible, and Amis had that in spades. Roger’s groping and lurching across the span of pages make for compelling reading. And given that he doesn’t quite escape America unpunished (the last page will have you howling), I can, in the final analysis, recommend the book—but only for readers whose skins are a tad thicker than the norm.
—Robert Rodi
