![]() I’m wondering if Spacks so disliked Lucky Jim because it ridicules her profession. These three novels all challenge the assumptions of a capitalist society. Salinger’s classic, Catcher in the Rye, and deems Lucky Jim unfunny. Wodehouse, but she dismisses Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook as anti-male, hates J. Spacks’s vigorous, opinionated book is worth a look for the brilliant essay on Jane Austen’s Emma, but her readings of many twentieth-century novels are conservative. I reread Lucky Jim for a peculiar reason: Patricia Meyer Spacks trashed it in her fascinating book, On Rereading. How could I not laugh? Kingsley Amis was an “angry young man.” Jim is an angry young man. ![]() He has no interest in his subject, makes faces behind the back of the department chair, steals a taxi from one of the more genial professors, and is aware of the absurdity of an article he is trying to publish, which has the farcical title, ” The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485.” ![]() In Kingsley Amis’s brilliant academic satire, a novel I have loved since my college days, the hero, Jim Dixon, teaches medieval history at a provincial university. ![]()
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