(2 of 4)
Since Kingsley Amis is an amiable satirist, Jim Dixon grins and bears the fact that he has attained status without achieving size. At worst, his is the venom of a reasonably contented rattlesnake. Under pressure, Dixon retreats to the practical joke as readily as Walter Mitty did to the hero-fantasy; when socially and emotionally discomfited, he makes faces—"his Edith Sitwell face," "his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face." At novel's end he tries to articulate his flashes of Angst in the pan during a drunken public lecture: "The point about Merrie England is that it was about the most un-Merrie period in our history. It's only the home-made pottery crowd, the organic husbandry crowd, the recorder-playing crowd . . ." He keels over "without even telling them."
Jim No. 2 & Joe. To hear what Lucky Jim is really too gentle to tell, the reader must turn to an unlucky Jim—James Porter, irascible hero of John Osborne's play, Look Back in Anger (TIME, April 22). Look Back is a high-decibel three-act diatribe, mainly on mom, wife, God and country. Hero Jimmy has just written a poem called "The Cess Pool." His wife hovers over an ironing board—one of the endemic props of this school of social realism, together with dirty dishes and wet "nappies"' (diapers). At the slightest provocation Jimmy turns into a verbal epileptic, particularly concerning his wife —"When you see a woman in front of her bedroom mirror, you realize what a refined sort of a butcher she is. Did you ever see some dirty old Arab, sticking his fingers into some mess of lamb fat and gristle? Well, she's just like that."
When he is not being hysterical. Hero Jimmy gets to the heart of what is the matter: "There aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the oldfashioned, grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you." Says Jimmy's mistress of Jimmy: "He thinks he's still in the middle of the French Revolution. And that's where he ought to be, of course."
In a bestseller, Room at the Top, by John Braine, published in England just ten weeks ago, the third face of Lucky Jim emerges: that of the intellectual spiv ruthlessly making his luck. Joe Lampton is only a town clerk, but he knows what he wants—an Aston-Martin sports car, a villa in Cannes, and a girl who will look just right in either. When the daughter of the local industrial tycoon pops the question, "Joe, do you really love me?" Joe coos back sweet nothings in the shape of five zeros: "A hundred thousand pounds' worth." Room at the Top suggests for the first time that the Welfare State can be used as a runway for a take-off into the upper economic air by a young man who is not too finicky about throwing his friends over the side to gain altitude.