By MATTHEW WALTHER • September 19, 2012


"Prayers have been answered: Kingsley Amis’s novels Lucky Jim and The Old Devils are being reissued in the United States. The New York Review of Books Press has printed the new editions with introductions by Keith Gessen (n+1 editor and novelist) and John Banville (Irish novelist and critic). Eric Hanson has drawn splendid covers for both, but I especially like his Jim Dixon: head down, arms behind his back and hands reaching out from his elbow-patched tweed, his weary cigarette sending up a pathetic little smoke signal as he approaches the lecture hall’s monstrous redbrick façade.


Why has Amis been out of print in the United States for so long? Taste enters into the equation: strict High Tories as a rule prefer the mandarin prose of Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell, just as the sanguine among us favor P.G. Wodehouse, who never left the sunny side of the street. Academic snobbery must also be inculpated: the Amis oeuvretenaciously avoids subsumption into fashionable critical narratives, and Girl, 20 will never appear on an American college syllabus. But finally there is that familiar specter haunting Amis père—his son Martin."