Drink and the Old Devil
Posted by Review-a-Day, June 7, 2007 12:00 am 1 Comment Filed under: Review-a-Day. The Life of Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader
Reviewed by Peter Green
The New Republic Online
"What essential ingredients go to make up a satirist? In particular, what high-octane social gases are needed to fuel, and to spark, his (seldom, till the feminist revolution, her) process of internal combustion? Facit indignatio versum, snarled Juvenal, that poverty-stricken and passé gentleman place-seeker, two millennia ago: it is resentment that drives me to write. Cliché-ridden hack writing, jumped-up rich lower-class arrivistes, pushy aggressive women, trendy homosexuals, pretentious bores, above all Greeks (Juvenal's anti-Hellenic rant has all the qualities of later anti-Semitism)..." Read the entire New Republic Online review.
This is the third review of this book that has come to my attention, and it is by far the best. The critics cover the same territory, but Peter Green does it with grace, humor and compassion.