Synopses & Reviews
Review
"In That Uncertain Feeling (1955), one of Kingsley Amis's lesser novels, the narrator, John Lewis, is watching some young women play tennis, and decides to examine himself on an important question: "Why did I like women's breasts so much? I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?" It's surprising, in a way, that Amis didn't capitalize those last words, as he was apt to do when he required any savage or emotional emphasis in his correspondence with Philip Larkin. (George Du Maurier's Trilby, for example, "might be a lot worse," he wrote. "AND A LOT BETTER.") But he seldom permitted any such heaviness to pervade his novels, and it is this very delicacy that allows one to answer the sensitive and dangerous question not Why is Lucky Jim funny? (daunting enough as an essay topic) but Why is it so funny?..." Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic review)
Review
"Dixon makes little dents in the smug fabric of hypocritical, humbugging, classbound British society...Amis caught the mood of post-war restiveness in a book which, though socially significant, was, and still is, extremely funny." Anthony Burgess
Review
"A classic comic novel, a seminal campus novel, and a novel which seized and expressed the mood of those who came of age in the 1950s. But there is more to it than that . . . Its university setting functions primarily as the epitome of a stuffy, provincial bourgeois world into which the hero is promoted by education, and against whose values and codes he rebels, at first inwardly and at last outwardly." David Lodge